The Reform Did Not Stop With One Generation

Mexico’s 1993 compulsory-schooling reform changed the education of some adults, but its reach can be measured in another place: the schooling of their children. This chapter examines the parent–child evidence, focusing on what an additional year of reform-induced parental education changed in children’s enrolment and why the strongest effects appear at secondary thresholds. The result supports a careful form of intergenerational mobility: parental schooling raised observed enrolment among co-residing children, but the evidence does not guarantee completed education, tertiary attendance, or higher income in the next generation.

The parent-schooling link

The 2020 census makes the intergenerational analysis possible by linking adults to children who live in the same household. Household identifiers and parent–child relationship codes connect parents in the reform-cohort sample to co-residing children aged 6–20. The study then measures outcomes in age brackets corresponding roughly to primary, lower secondary, upper secondary, and higher education, allowing the reader to see where a parental schooling effect appears and where it does not.

The causal margin is the same one used for the adult outcomes. Reform eligibility changes the parent’s schooling; the parent’s schooling is then used to estimate differences in the child’s outcome. This is not the same as comparing children of highly educated parents with children of less educated parents. Families differ in resources, location, expectations, health, and many other ways. The reform supplies a source of parental education that is tied to the cohort threshold, making it possible to isolate a local effect under the study’s instrumental-variable assumptions.

The clearest result is at the secondary-school transition. One additional year of parental schooling increased children’s secondary enrolment by about 3–4 percentage points. The effect on upper-secondary enrolment was larger, about 5–8 percentage points. These are changes in the probability of being enrolled in the relevant age group, not direct measures of completed schooling. Even with that qualification, the pattern is consequential: the reform-induced gain in a parent’s education made it more likely that a child would remain in or reach the levels of schooling where the parent’s own path had changed.

The effects were especially pronounced in small rural localities. That concentration is consistent with the broader pattern in the reform study. Where the first generation had the largest educational margin to gain, and where the next generation faced more limited access, a parent’s additional schooling may have had more room to change a child’s enrolment. It does not prove that one particular household mechanism—income, information, aspiration, or parental help—caused the result. It identifies where the intergenerational association generated by the reform was strongest.

The outcome pattern is not uniformly positive at every educational level. Effects on literacy and primary enrolment were modest and, in the reported main results, statistically significant only for father–child pairs. Higher-education enrolment showed no significant change. That does not mean parental education has no possible relationship with tertiary education. It means the reform-induced schooling margin and the children observed in this sample provide clearer evidence at secondary and upper-secondary thresholds than at the higher-education threshold.