Intergenerational Mobility in Educational Attainment in Mexico

Abstract

Education in Mexico expanded rapidly over the past several generations. We use data from the 1994 Gender, Age, Family and Work household survey to document the anatomy of Mexico's educational expansion. The survey is to our knowledge the first in Mexico that also gathered additional data on characteristics of the household of origin, including parent's education and occupation, sibship size and the birth order of the respondent. Using cohorts created from the survey, we detail patterns of educational attainment and intergenerational mobility in Mexico during the past four decades. By several measures, we find that intergenerational educational mobility has increased over time. Younger cohorts are more likely than older cohorts to have surpassed their parents' schooling levels. The correlation between the education levels of parents and their offspring has fallen in past four decades. Overall, the correlations suggest that there is slightly less intergenerational mobility in Mexico than in the United States. Despite these gains, intergenerational mobility from the lowest to the highest schooling levels remains limited: only one-third of children born to parents with 6 or fewer years of schooling complete high school, compared to four-fifths of children born to parents with 12 or more years of schooling. This gap has narrowed only slightly since the 1960s.