Abstract
This study compares the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment across immigrant groups using the Swiss Census 2000. Determinants of educational outcome and educational mobility are examined. A child’s educational opportunity depends on its parental background. Not only the effect of parental human capital but also other determinants of child educational attainment vary depending on the child’s nationality. Overall educational upward mobility is more pronounced among second generation immigrants than among natives. Children of Turkish, Portuguese and former Yugoslavian origin appear to be most disadvantaged in the process of human capital formation.
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For cultural and historic reasons there is substantial heterogeneity in the educational careers pursued in the French- and German-speaking regions of Switzerland. Whereas in the German-speaking regions up to two-thirds of a cohort pursue an apprenticeship that figure is less than half in the French-speaking regions.
Van Ours and Veenman (2003) find the opposite result for the Netherlands.
In the year 2000, the Swiss Census counts 87,135 17-year olds. 74,600 observations could be categorised into 48,130 natives, 10,298 first, and 14,686 second generation immigrants. Further, 2,622 youths are dropped due to missing information about current schooling level or ethnic origin. The final sample contains 47,391 natives, 8,516 first, and 13,846 second generation immigrants.
The following nations are distinguished: Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Turkey, and Portugal. Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia, Macedonia and Albania are summarized as “Balkan states”. Eastern Europe forms a separate category. All other Western, Northern, and Southern European countries are summed up in a “Rest of Europe” group, to which the small number of individuals from Canada and the United States were added. Nations in Africa, South America, and Asia were combined in these continent groups.
In principle, one might have considered additional categories. However, those at the margins had very few observations and the different educational choices which we combine in our middle category do not have a natural ordering.
The language regions are categorised at the cantonal level. As a robustness check, we also defined language regions at a community level and obtained very similar results.
The degree of urbanity is classified based on a typology by Schuler (2001). We aggregated the 22 subgroups into seven categories.
The estimations are based on children of low educated fathers. If the child does not live with a father also children of mothers with low education are considered. The results are similar if the sampling is based on the educational degree of the mother.
As a robustness check, the same models were also estimated using a multinomial logit estimator. However, the results did not differ substantially.
Given that parents might choose their region of residence in view of potential educational consequences our estimations do not permit conclusions on causal effects.
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Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge very helpful comments and suggestions of two anonymous referees. This research is supported by the Swiss Nation Science Foundation NFP 52 “Childhood, Youth and Intergenerational Relationships” grant.
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Bauer, P., Riphahn, R.T. Education and its intergenerational transmission: country of origin-specific evidence for natives and immigrants from Switzerland. Port. Econ. J. 5, 89–110 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10258-006-0011-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10258-006-0011-8