Social origin effects on educational mobility and labor market outcomes: a closer look at technical educational enrollment in Mexico

Abstract

Educational decisions may have a distinctive social origin pattern when an educational system offers parallel branches of study, a phenomenon termed as class inequality in educational attainment. In Mexico, the educational system allows students to choose between obtaining technical or academic degrees at both lower and upper secondary educational levels. The present study aims at analyzing 1) the effect of the social origin on educational track choice and 2) the relationship between type of educational attainment and labor market outcomes in Mexico. A two-part multinomial logit model is used to identify the effect of social origin on educational track decisions. Our results show that the social origin does have an effect on the type of education students opt for. Individuals with more favorable social origin characteristics are less likely to pursue technical educational programs; evidence confirming the presence of class inequality in educational enrollment in Mexico. An OLS regression was then used to analyze the effect of type of educational attainment on labor market outcomes. Once we control for the non-random allocation process by including as additional regressors the predicted probabilities of the multinomial stages we find that there’s no statistically significant effect of technical educational track selection on hourly income nor labor market participation; suggesting that although the Mexican educational system generates class inequality in educational attainment, no real labor market advantage is gained or lost from obtaining a distinct type of education.