Executive summary

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The objective of this research is to focus on the education outcomes of the children of immigrants. We ask three questions. First, what is the degree of intergenerational education mobility, and is it different among immigrants and their children? Second, what factors are most tightly related to the schooling outcomes of second generation Canadians, parental earnings or parental education? And third, has the strength of the tie between the education of immigrant parents and their Canadian-born children changed over time?

We answer these questions by employing the regression to the mean model to measure mobility in education across the generations. This is done in two separate ways: (1) by indirectly using a grouped estimator from the censuses with which immigrant fathers are drawn from the 1981 Census and their potential second-generation children are drawn from the 2001 Census, and (2) by directly using self-reported information on parental education from the Ethnic Diversity Survey.

The main findings are summarized as follows. First, we find that persistence in the years of schooling across the generations is rather weak between immigrants and their Canadian-born children: only about a third as strong as for the Canadian-born children of Canadian-born parents. Second, money has little to do with this intergenerational tie, indeed if anything, lower earning immigrant parents have more educated children. Finally, the strength of the tie between parent and child years of schooling has not changed across the birth cohorts of the post-war era.

Nevertheless, a few caveats are offered when interpreting the results. First, our analysis cannot and is not intended to uncover or outline the reasons for these patterns. Second, we also underscore the fact that our descriptive results are global, referring to societal averages. Indeed, there are a few areas that may require further analyses. One particular case is that immigrant fathers come to the country with greater than average education, yet earn less than average; these fathers then witness a similar scenario occurring for their children. Moreover, the analysis is historical in nature, referring to cohorts of immigrants who arrived in the country some decades in the past, and whose children attended school in the past. Unclear is the extent to which the patterns we uncover, and the particular groups we highlight, can be extrapolated into the future.