Who They Were There: Immigrants' Educational Selectivity and Their Children's Educational Attainment

Abstract

This article examines the educational selectivity of immigrants in France—i.e. how their level of education contrasts with that of non-migrants in their country of birth-and the influence of this selectivity on the educational attainment of their children. I combine the Barro-Lee data set (2010) with the French TeO survey (2008-2009) to construct a measure of 'relative educational attainment', i.e. an immigrant's position in the distribution of educational attainment among the population of the same cohort and gender in the immigrant's country of birth. I demonstrate that the level of immigrants' relative educational attainment differs both between and within countries of origin. I then show the positive influence of immigrant parents' relative educational attainment on their children's educational attainment, over and above family socioeconomic status in France. The intergenerational transmission of cultural resources and subjective social status are the proposed sociological mechanisms that can account for the intergenerational effect of immigrant educational selectivity. In the study of assimilation, both the theoretical and empirical literature have tended to overlook immigrant parents' pre-migration characteristics in the explanation of their children's educational and occupational out- comes. Yet, immigrants are also emigrants (Sayad, 2004; Waldinger et al., 2012). There are therefore strong reasons to consider immigrants' characteristics in and relative to their country of origin as relevant factors in shaping their experiences and that of their descendants in the country of destination. In this article, I examine the educational selectivity of immigrants in France—i.e. how their level of education contrasts with that of comparable non-migrants in their country of birth—and the influence of this selectivity on their children's educational attainment. By combining the 2010 version of the Barro-Lee data set on educational attainment distributions around the world and the French 2008-2009 'Trajectories and Origins' survey on immigrant families (INED, 2008- 2009), I created an individual-level measure of immi- grants' relative level of educational attainment in their country of origin. This unique measure allows me to show how immigrant educational selectivity varies between, and within, countries of origin. I then assess the impact of immigrants' relative educational attain- ment on their children's educational attainment in France.