Who They Were There: Immigrants’ Educational Selectivity and Their Children’s Educational Attainment

This paper examines the educational selectivity of immigrants in France – i.e. how their level of education contrasts with that of non-migrants in their country of birth – and the influence of this selectivity on the educational attainment of their children. I use the Barro-Lee dataset (2010), which compiles information on educational attainment by year, gender, and age group in 146 countries from 1950 to 2010. I combine this data with responses from INED’s Trajectoires et Origines survey (2009) to construct a measure of “relative educational attainment,” i.e an immigrant’s position in the distribution of educational attainment among the population of the same age and gender in their country of birth at the time when they emigrated. After showing that the direction and extent of immigrants’ educational selectivity differ by country of origin and period, I demonstrate and interpret the positive net effect of immigrants’ “relative education” on their children’s educational attainment, over and above family socioeconomic status in France. Finally, I put forward an interpretation of the mechanisms that could account for the influence of immigrants’ relative education on their children’s educational attainment.