Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Hong Kong: Are Immigrants More Mobile than Natives?

Abstract

We characterize intergenerational educational mobility by the percentage of children who have more schooling than their parents, and the change in the relative probability of the children attending university across their parents’ schooling levels. In Hong Kong, immigrant children are very upward mobile; their percentage of upward mobility has caught up with that of the children of the Hong Kong-born parents. Hong Kong-born children of immigrant parents are also more mobile than the children of Hong Kong born parents. Even though parental educational background remains important for university attendance, immigrant children experience higher mobility than Hong Kong-born children in terms of access to university education.