Intergenerational Transfer of Education Among Social Groups in India

In this paper, it is examined whether inequality in human capital in today’s generations reflects unequal opportunities which individuals inherit from their parents due to their belonging to a particular social group or caste category. To do so, we specifically examine the role of parental education on child's educational attainment. We have taken India Human Development Survey data (2011–2012) in this paper and tried to find out the effect of father’s/mother’s education on the educational attainment level of son/daughter particularly for different social groups, General Caste (GC), Other Backward Castes (OBC), Scheduled Castes (SC), and Scheduled Tribes (ST) in India. Intergenerational transfer can be understood in three ways: Persistence (same attainment of education between generations/no improvement), Downward Mobility (if education attainment falls from one generation to another), and Upward Mobility (if education attainment increases from one generation to the other). We focus particularly on upward mobility and persistence because only through these mechanisms human capability formation takes place. We further analyse this upward mobility to identify which pathway (Father-Son/Father-Daughter/Mother-Son/Mother-Daughter) is playing a more significant role in this transfer mechanism, whether father’s education or mother’s education play the same or different role, whether son’s level of educational attainment is the same or different for that of daughter to capture any gender differential in the transfer mechanism.