The return to school activity: Evidence for the Mexican context

The return to school is an important part of academic trajectories in more economically advanced societies where it often serves as a strategy for skill enhancement and socioeconomic advancement. Very little is known about this phenomenon in Mexico even though many youth and young adults return to school after beginning their working lives.
The objective of this article is to describe trends in the return to school across three cohorts of Mexican men and women and to identify the factors that are associated with return to school. We use human capital and life course theory to generate hypotheses regarding the determinants of the return to school.
The results show that factors positively associated with the return to school in this population included having secondary schooling or more, being unmarried, having lived in an urban area one year before, having parents in nonmanual or professional occupations, and belonging to younger cohorts. In contrast, age had a negative association with return to school.
Men and women had similar risk to return to their studies, but we find that women belonging to oldest cohort and women without employment experience one year before were less likely to return to school than their male counterparts.