Change and Stability in Educational Stratification

Abstract

The effects of parental socioeconomic characteristics on highest grade of formal school completed are stable over cohorts born during the first half of the twentieth century. Mathematical analysis and empirical findings based on the 1973 Occupational Changes in a Generation Survey show that linear models of the educational attainment process are stable over cohorts because their coefficients depend upon quantities which vary over time in offsetting directions. The coefficients are weighted sums of the associations between socioeconomic background and school continuation decisions where the weights are functions of the school continuation probabilities. Intercohort increases in school continuation rates by themselves imply declining background effects on educational attainment, but, over cohorts, the associations between background and continuation increase to offset the dampening effect of the changing marginal distribution of schooling. Stable linear model effects are the result.