A Socio Economic Perspective of Intergenerational Educational Mobility: Experience in West Bengal

Intergenerational educational mobility has been at the heart of development discourse particularly in the sense of equality of long term income opportunity. There have been persistent gaps in educational attainment across alternative socio-economic groups. Higher mobility in the marginalized classes, however, can bring about a convergence between the less and more privileged in the society. This paper explores primary data from survey in selected districts of West Bengal to analyse the extent of intergenerational educational mobility and its association with selected socio economic variables. This paper uses two related methodologies; (1) intergenerational simple regression coefficient and (2) ordered logistic technique. We have observed a strong association between parental education and child’s mean years of schooling, i.e. the society is largely immobile. Moreover, the analysis shows that the probability of the ward’s attaining tertiary level of education increases if father’s education falls in the tertiary level. However, for cross pairs i.e. father-daughter and mother-son the association is more pronounced. Furthermore, disaggregating the data at subgroups the analysis looks into the inter relationship between parental educational attainment and the child’s probability of reaching different educational levels across religion, castes, gender, economic condition and region. The results have been varied across the subgroups.