From Parent to Child Transmission of Educational

Authors: Renee Reichl Luthra Thomas Soehl

Publish Date: 2015/03/24

Volume: 52, Issue: 2, Pages: 543-567

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Abstract

One in five US residents under the age of 18 has at least one foreignborn parent Given the large proportion of immigrants with very low levels of schooling the strength of the intergenerational transmission of education between immigrant parent and child has important repercussions for the future of social stratification in the United States We find that the educational transmission process between parent and child is much weaker in immigrant families than in native families and among immigrants differs significantly across national origins We demonstrate how this variation causes a substantial overestimation of the importance of parental education in immigrant families in studies that use aggregate data We also show that the common practice of “controlling” for family human capital using parental years of schooling is problematic when comparing families from different origin countries and especially when comparing native and immigrant families We link these findings to analytical and empirical distinctions between group and individuallevel processes in intergenerational transmissionThe initial members of the “new” immigration wave following the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 have now settled and their USborn children have come of age Although the distribution of immigrants in terms of human capital is bimodal it is especially the large group of immigrants with little formal education that raises concerns about the impact of immigration on social inequality With the children of immigrants currently composing more than 20 of the US population under age 18 the extent to which this population will inherit the educational characteristics of their parents is significant for the immediate and longterm future of ethnic stratification in the United StatesAlthough the strength of intergenerational educational transmission is well documented for the general US population Blau and Duncan 1967 Mare 1981 until recently transmission within immigrant families was difficult to assess because of a lack of representative largescale data identifying the educational attainments of immigrants and their adult children Instead researchers relied on aggregate data using national origin or selfreported ethnicity to link generations by regressing the average years of educational attainment of the children of immigrants on the average years of educational attainment of immigrants of the same origins in previous survey years Borjas 1993 2006 Card 2005 Card et al 2000 Park and Myers 2010 Smith 2003 Even as individuallevel data on immigrants and their children became available the majority of the literature on secondgeneration attainment has focused on differences in attainment controlling for parental background rather than examining the relationship between parental and child educational attainment itself for research from the past five years for instance see Feliciano 2012 Greenman 2013 Haller et al 2011 Harris et al 2008 Kasinitz et al 2008 Keller and Tillman 2008 Thomas 2009 Waters et al 2010 Xie and Greenman 2011This article provides a first methodological demonstration of potential biases emerging from both of these common approaches to the study of educational inequality among the immigrant second generation A recent review of European research by Heath et al 2008 suggests that the status transmission processes may differ across immigrant origin groups and Alba et al 2011 also pointed to the fact that educational attainment of immigrants of different origins are unlikely to be comparable However neither these scholars nor the studies they reviewed have systematically evaluated the potential for bias when the educational attainments of different immigrant groups are treated as commensurate We expand on these initial warnings outlining in detail how both of these methods rely on the assumption that educational transmission is uniform between immigrants of different origins and when natives are compared between immigrant and native families as wellWe demonstrate that this assumption is not upheld in the US case The resulting bias in estimates of intergenerational transmission and expected years of education is severe Using the educational attainment of parent–child dyads we find the regression coefficient of children’s on parents’ years of education is on average 011 but ranges from close to 0 in some groups to as high as 037 This implies a generally weak relationship between parental and child educational attainment within immigrant families1 In contrast when aggregating the very same data and using weighted averages of national origin groups as has been done in prior research we find much higher estimates an association between foreignborn parents’ and their children’s education of 043 We also show that when parental education enters a model as a control variable models that assume a homogeneous relationship between parental and child education distort national origin comparisonsWe connect these findings to research that suggests significant variation in the link between parental education and the larger set of variables that shape the educational attainment of children between immigrants and natives on the one hand and across immigrants from different national origins on the other We also establish two correlates of the strength of educational transmission parent–child links are stronger in groups with higher average education and links are weaker in groups with higher withingroup variation In our conclusions we discuss the relationship between these correlates and current understandings of national origin variation in secondgeneration attainmentSociologists studying migration have long been interested in intergenerational change among immigrants writing extensively on the earlier “great wave” of migration at the turn of the century Gordon 1964 Park 1930 Warner and Srole 1945 These early theories conceived of assimilation as a grouplevel process predicting a sequence of improving group relations with the disappearance of ethnic groups as its endpoint Even Gordon’s influential treatise on the subject is framed as a corrective to the lack of “research and theoretical attention to the nature and implications of American communal group life” 19645 emphasis addedThese approaches were extraordinarily productive guiding immigration research for the better part of a century yet they do not clearly delineate between individual and grouplevel processes Assimilation is seen as a convergence of immigrant groups toward the “core” and the disappearance of prejudice and discrimination At the same time it encompasses processes that are clearly individual in nature such as intermarriage shifts in participation and identification

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