Abstract
One in five U.S. residents under the age of 18 has at least one foreign-born 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 individual-level processes in intergenerational transmission.
Highlights
The initial members of the “new” immigration wave following the U.S Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 have settled, and their U.S.-born children have comeR.R
The strength of intergenerational educational transmission is well documented for the general U.S population (Blau and Duncan 1967; Mare 1981), until recently, transmission within immigrant families was difficult to assess because of a lack of representative, large-scale data identifying the educational attainments of immigrants and their adult children
This article demonstrates that intergenerational transmission of education is weaker within immigrant families than in native families and that the strength of the transmission differs between immigrants of different national origins
Summary
The initial members of the “new” immigration wave following the U.S Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 have settled, and their U.S.-born children have comeR.R. This implies a generally weak relationship between parental and child educational attainment within immigrant families.1 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 foreign-born parents’ and their children’s education
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