Reversal of Fortunes or Continued Success? Cohort Differences in Education and Earnings of Childhood Immigrants - ARCHIVED

Current knowledge about the favourable socioeconomic attainment (in education and earnings) among children of immigrants is based on the experiences of those individuals whose immigrant parents came to Canada before the 1970s. Since then, successive cohorts of adult immigrants have experienced deteriorating entry earnings. This has raised questions about whether the outcomes of their children have changed over time. This study shows that successive cohorts of childhood immigrants who arrived in Canada at age 12 or younger during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had increasingly higher educational attainment (as measured by the share with university degrees) than their Canadian-born peers by age 25 to 34. Conditional on education and other background characteristics, male childhood immigrants who arrived in the 1960s earned less than the Canadian-born comparison group, but the two subsequent cohorts had similar earnings as the comparison group. Female childhood immigrants earned as much as the Canadian-born comparison group, except for the 1980s cohort, which earned more.