Intergenerational educational mobility over the past century in Canada

Abstract

Young adults born at the end of the 20th century attend colleges and universities at much higher rates than did previous generations, which might give the impression of greater upward educational mobility and in turn, greater class mobility. This impression occurs, however, only because of structural expansion of the Canadian education system. In contrast to structural change, exchange mobility highlights the linkage between one's social origins and destinations. This speaks more directly to questions of equality of educational opportunity and social fairness. Greater fairness or social progress occurs when, over time, destinations become less contingent on origins. We examine intergenerational exchange mobility in Canada by investigating how, if at all, the linkage between parents’ and their children's education has changed over the past century. We construct a longitudinal dataset covering the 20th century by merging fifteen cross‐sectional surveys from Statistics Canada's General Social Survey (GSS) between 1986 and 2014. Comparing across synthetic birth cohorts we focus on transition probabilities, odds ratios, and logistic regression estimates to measure change. We contribute to a growing gap in the Canadian literature since social mobility has been largely neglected by sociologists as of late. We compare our results to recent findings of economists who examine intergenerational income mobility, another indicator of class mobility. Consistent with earlier sociological and economic research, our results show that despite the tremendous expansion of Canada's education systems, intergenerational exchange mobility for both women and men has been stagnant in Canada over the past century.

Educational mobility in Canada, 1969–2016: Evidence from the longitudinal and international study of adults

“…8 I present the results of the linear probability models with and without the variables number of books in the home and the ability proxy to examine the mediating properties of them and to show that the inclusion of the ability proxy in the regression models does not substantively alter the coefficients and thus the conclusions I reach. 9 The estimates for high school completion and access to post-secondary education are slightly smaller than those found in Chow & Guppy (2021). This is most likely due to the restricting of educational transitions at ages prior to when they observe these transitions in their study.…”

“…At the same time, accounts of intergenerational educational mobility in the Canadian context that have sought to extend these analyses to more recent cohorts are scant, due in part to a lack of accessible and suitable education data, and reach conflicting conclusions. Some find that children's educational attainment has come to depend less on that of their parents among recent cohorts (McIntosh, 2009; Turcotte, 2011), while others argue that this relationship has remained stable (Chow & Guppy, 2021).…”

“…A study based on Canadian cohorts born between 1905 and 1969 finds no trends in the relative influence of parents’ education on children's educational attainment despite the educational expansion of the 1950s and ’60s (Wanner, 1999). One of the few published extensions to more recent cohorts (those born toward the end of the 20 th century) similarly finds no significant increase in relative mobility despite rising absolute levels of educational attainment (Chow & Guppy, 2021).…”

“…Indeed, the work of Canadian sociologists finds support for these theories. While educational expansion in Canada has led to increased access for students with less‐educated parents (Chow & Guppy, 2021; Lehmann, 2012; Turcotte, 2011), more advantaged students have been able to seek out quantitative and qualitative advantages such as attending more prestigious post‐secondary institutions or pursuing graduate studies (Davies et al., 2014; Zarifa, 2012), which research has shown to provide benefits in the school‐to‐work transition and for adult status attainment (Aslam & Lehmann, 2021; Mullen et al., 2021). In this study, support for the MMI perspective would take the form of persistent links between parental education and successive educational transitions, while support for EMI could take the form of institutional differences in access to post‐secondary education.…”

“…For instance, Turcotte (2011) and Sen and Clemente (2010) examine only one educational transition, completing a university degree, among all respondents in their samples 1 . This is problematic since it fails to consider waning selection effects at earlier educational transitions across cohorts (Chow & Guppy, 2021; Holm & Jæger, 2011; Mare, 1981; Wanner, 1999). For this reason, the increased proportion of university degree holders in Turcotte's (2011) study could be due to more people graduating from high school than to an actual reduction in the effect of parents’ education on university degree attainment (Chow & Guppy, 2021).…”