Educational Achievement of Second Generation Immigrants: An International Comparison
43 Pages Posted: 24 Jan 2012
Date Written: September 1, 2011
Abstract
This paper investigates the educational achievements of second generation immigrants in several OECD countries in a comparative perspective. We first show that the educational achievement (measured as test scores in PISA achievement tests) of children of immigrants is quite heterogeneous across countries, and strongly related to achievements of the parent generation. The disadvantage considerably reduces, and even disappears for some countries, once we condition on parental background characteristics. Second, we provide novel analysis of cross-country comparisons of test scores of children from the same country of origin, and compare (conditional) achievement scores in home and host countries. The focus is on Turkish immigrants, whom we observe in several destination countries. We investigate both mathematics and reading test scores, and show that the results vary according to the type of skills tested. For mathematics, in most countries and even if the test scores achievement of the children of Turkish immigrants is lower than that of their native peers, it is still higher than that of children of their cohort in the home country - conditional and unconditional on parental background characteristics. The analysis suggests that higher school quality relative to that in the home country is important to explain immigrant children’s educational advantage.
Keywords: Education, Second-Generation Immigrants
JEL Classification: J61, J62, I2
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Intergenerational Education Mobility Among the Children of Canadian Immigrants
By Abdurrahman Aydemir, Wen-hao Chen, ...
-
Intergenerational Earnings Mobility Among the Children of Canadian Immigrants
By Abdurrahman Aydemir, Wen-hao Chen, ...
-
By Mats Hammarstedt and Marten Palme
-
Intergenerational Transmission of Language Capital and Economic Outcomes
By Teresa Casey and Christian Dustmann
-
Ethnic Identity and Labor-Market Outcomes of Immigrants in Europe
By Alberto Bisin, Eleonora Patacchini, ...
-
Immigration Background and the Intergenerational Correlation in Education
-
Immigration Background and the Intergenerational Correlation in Education
-
By Jan C. Van Ours and Justus Veenman
-
By Jan C. Van Ours and Justus Veenman