Intergenerational Educational Mobility During the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Intergenerational educational mobility, capturing the extent to which children's education is associated with their parents’ education, has become a major global policy discussion. Studying its long‐term patterns across countries remains difficult, especially in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs), due to limited early twentieth‐century data. Analyzing about 53.7 million observations from 92 countries, using mainly IPUMS census data, we find that recent cohorts exhibit increasing educational mobility across various world regions, with post‐Soviet countries as exceptions. This increase is more prominent for daughters, resulting in a narrowed gender‐based mobility gap in many LMICs, while reversing this pattern in high‐income countries (HICs), with daughters being more mobile in recent decades. Nevertheless, mobility remains higher in HICs than in LMICs. Moreover, we identify a significant association between the expansion of schooling and intergenerational mobility. This expansion is associated with a more substantial rise in intergenerational mobility for daughters, especially in relation to their mothers’ education compared to that of their fathers. Our results demonstrate strong external and internal validity through a series of robustness checks, including data triangulation across multiple sources.