Intergenerational persistence of educational status in South Africa

This paper has used the NIDS dataset to measure the intergenerational mobility of education, over a ten-year period in South Africa. The research considers both father-son and motherdaughter pairs over the last ten years and yields interesting results, displaying a clear increase in educational mobility in terms of the estimated regression and correlation coefficients for both father-son and mother-daughter pairs. However, decomposing this result into educational cohorts, the distribution of the increase in educational mobility is not experienced uniformly, with a more mobile education system predominantly falling on the children of parents with a high school level of education. Children whose parents had no education and those whose parents were educated at a tertiary level experienced increases in the persistence of educational status. These results have serious policy implications as the average level of education has increased, yet these increases have not been experienced equally and are dependent on family background