Intergenerational educational mobility continues to be low in India
All of us love stories of the son or daughter of an uneducated daily wage labourer or farmer cracking civil service or Indian Institute of Technology entrance exams. The real question, however, is whether such success stories, constituting inter-generational upward mobility in education, are becoming more common or do they constitute pleasant aberrations? Recent economic research suggests that the latter situation is more likely.
A December 2015 research paper by Mehtabul Azam and Vipul Bhatt, economists at Oklahoma State University and James Madison University, used the data provided by India Human Development Survey (IHDS) to look at this question. Mint has replicated the methodology used by Azam and Bhatt to establish a relation between educational attainment levels of fathers and sons. Necessary clarification: the survey data does not allow for a similar comparison involving mothers or daughters. The comparison looks at two sets of individuals: those born in the 1950s and those born in the 1980s. The results are not encouraging. Only around one in five sons born in the 1980s, whose fathers had no formal education, could pass standard 10th or its equivalent level. To be sure, there has been a slight improvement on this count over time. For those born in the 1950s, the figure was a little over one in 10. On the other hand, 9 out of 10 sons whose fathers are graduates finish standard 10th.
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