Are high school degrees and university diplomas equally heritable in the US? A new measure of relative intergenerational mobility

Abstract

This paper proposes the application of an existing measure in a new context. Specifically, we adapt a measure originally proposed to characterize the degree of educational assortative mating to measure relative intergenerational mobility along the educational trait and inequality of opportunity. The new inequality measure is more suitable for controlling for the variations in the trait distributions of individuals and their parents than the commonly used intergenerational persistence coefficient. This point is illustrated by our empirical analysis of US census data from the period between 1960 and 2010: we show that controlling for the variations in the trait distributions adequately is vital in assessing the part of intergenerational mobility which is not caused by the educational expansion. Failing to do so can potentially reverse the relative priority of various policies aiming at reducing the “heritability” of (lack of) high school degrees and (lack of) tertiary education diplomas.