Luthra Renee Reichl, Soehl Thomas
Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK,
Demography. 2015 Apr;52(2):543-67. doi: 10.1007/s13524-015-0376-3.
One in five U.S. residents under the age of 18 has at least one foreign-born parent. Given the large proportion of immigrants with very low levels of schooling, the strength of the intergenerational transmission of education between immigrant parent and child has important repercussions for the future of social stratification in the United States. We find that the educational transmission process between parent and child is much weaker in immigrant families than in native families and, among immigrants, differs significantly across national origins. We demonstrate how this variation causes a substantial overestimation of the importance of parental education in immigrant families in studies that use aggregate data. We also show that the common practice of "controlling" for family human capital using parental years of schooling is problematic when comparing families from different origin countries and especially when comparing native and immigrant families. We link these findings to analytical and empirical distinctions between group- and individual-level processes in intergenerational transmission.
在美国，每五名18岁以下的居民中就有一人至少有一位出生在国外的父母。鉴于很大一部分移民受教育程度极低，移民父母与子女之间教育的代际传递强度对美国社会分层的未来具有重要影响。我们发现，移民家庭中父母与子女之间的教育传递过程比本土家庭要弱得多，而且在移民群体中，不同国家来源之间存在显著差异。我们证明了，在使用汇总数据的研究中，这种差异是如何导致对移民家庭中父母教育重要性的大幅高估的。我们还表明，在比较来自不同原籍国的家庭时，尤其是在比较本土家庭和移民家庭时，用父母受教育年限“控制”家庭人力资本的常见做法存在问题。我们将这些发现与代际传递中群体层面和个体层面过程的分析及实证差异联系起来。
