It's not only property and values that one inherits but education as well, it seems. Children of parents who are well educated have better chance of becoming well educated themselves, finds an Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) working paper.
It says a student's chance of obtaining higher education increases significantly if his or her parents have graduate education.
The paper written by IIM-A's Prof Rakesh Basant and Gitanjali Sen is titled 'Parental Education as a Criterion for Affirmative Action in Higher Education: A Preliminary Analysis'.
The paper pooled together cross section data sets collected at three different points of time by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) to analyse the effect of socio-religious affiliation and parental education on participation in higher education (HE) even after controlling for various other individual, household and location factors.
"The results of all stock models show that parents' education is a significant factor in their children's educational participation. The marginal effects of parents' education are highly positive and significant. The impact of parental education increases dramatically as it changes from illiteracy to secondary, higher secondary to graduate education, with graduate education having the largest impact," states the paper.
The paper presents the percentage of children who are either graduates or are currently enrolled for higher education (HE) by the educational attainment of their parents.
"In 2009-10, less than 2 per cent children of parents who are non-literate were currently enrolled in HE while this percentage was about 15 per cent for parents with a graduate degree. The other trend worth noting is that participation in HE of children has risen for all categories of parental education during 1999-2010; for illiterate parents, the estimates of children who are currently studying for HE has gone up from 0.4 in 1999-2000 to 1.9 in 2009-10," states the paper.
The paper studies three variables using four categories namely all parents who never attended any school (non-literate parents), parents who attended school but completed education up to secondary or anything below that level (secondary or below), parents, who completed higher secondary education (HS) and parents who completed graduate level of education or anything above that (completed graduate).
In sum, even after controlling for other factors the level of parental education turns out to be a very important factor for explaining the participation in higher education, states the paper.
