The Effects of Family Income, Parental Education and Other Background Factors on Access to Post‐Secondary Education in Canada: Evidence from the YITS

Abstract

This paper exploits the unprecedented rich information available in the Canadian Youth in Transition Survey, Sample A (YITS‐A) to investigate issues related to access to postsecondary education (PSE). The questions we ask are basically two‐fold: i) What are the various influences on access to PSE of an individual’s background, including more traditional measures such as family income and parental education, as well as a broader set of measures such as high school grades, social/academic “engagement,” and other cognitive and behavioural influences? and ii) How does including such a more extensive set of variables than has been possible in previous studies change the estimated effects of the more conventionally measured family/parental influences (family income and parental education) on access to PSE, and thus indicate how much of the latter influences operate through (or otherwise proxy) the effects of the broader set of variables, thereby isolating the direct – as opposed to indirect – influence of these traditional measures on access? Utilizing multinomial logit models to capture the choice of level of PSE (i.e., college versus university) we find that parental income is positively related to university attendance, while having only a minor effect on college, but this effect is greatly diminished once parental education is included in the estimation. Similarly, the importance of parental education to university attendance is somewhat diminished once certain measures of high school grades, academic “engagement,” and a standardised reading test score are included – although, interestingly, these additional variables have little further affect on the family income influences. These results thus support other recent work which points to the importance of addressing earlier cognitive and behavioural influences, and family “culture” more generally as captured by parental education, in effecting change in the rates and patterns of participation in PSE – although family income does remain a significant independent factor, albeit of significantly reduced influence.