Intergenerational Educational Mobility During the Twentieth Century

Abstract:

Intergenerational educational mobility, capturing the extent to which children's education is associated with their parents’ education, has become a major global policy discussion. Studying its long-term patterns across countries remains difficult, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), due to limited early twentieth-century data. Analyzing about 53.7 million observations from 92 countries, using mainly IPUMS census data, we find that recent cohorts exhibit increasing educational mobility across various world regions, with post-Soviet countries as exceptions. This increase is more prominent for daughters, resulting in a narrowed gender-based mobility gap in many LMICs, while reversing this pattern in high-income countries (HICs), with daughters being more mobile in recent decades. Nevertheless, mobility remains higher in HICs than in LMICs. Moreover, we identify a significant association between the expansion of schooling and intergenerational mobility. This expansion is associated with a more substantial rise in intergenerational mobility for daughters, especially in relation to their mothers’ education compared to that of their fathers. Our results demonstrate strong external and internal validity through a series of robustness checks, including data triangulation across multiple sources.