Beyond Wages: What the Reform Really Changed

Mexico’s 1993 extension of compulsory schooling provides a strong answer to the question at the centre of this series: yes, schooling can reshape a life beyond wages, but the effect is neither automatic nor evenly distributed. The reform moved some people across a lower-secondary threshold, and the education induced by that change was followed through family formation, child survival, work, mobility, and children’s enrolment. The final judgment is therefore conditional. A mandate can have large marginal returns where educational gaps are widest, but access, local supply, quality, labour demand, and progression determine whether an extra year becomes durable mobility.

The causal chain is the finding

The reform’s significance is not that it produced one spectacular number. Its significance is that the same policy-generated schooling variation appears across several stages of life. The chain begins with a legal threshold: Mexico moved compulsory education from six to nine years in 1993, creating a cohort boundary around the 1981 birth year. Eligibility raised attainment near that boundary, but the average gain was modest—about 0.17 years of schooling. The policy’s reach was larger among people speaking an Indigenous language and in smaller rural localities, where baseline attainment and access were lower.

That first-stage pattern changes how every later outcome should be read. The study is not observing a random extra year assigned to an average Mexican adult. It is estimating the consequences of schooling for compliers: people whose attainment rose because the reform reached them. Their prior constraints were part of the treatment context. The people most likely to be affected were also more likely to live in places with limited secondary access, high agricultural employment, and weaker labour-market integration. The reform’s unequal reach is therefore not an adjustment to a general result; it defines the population in which the general result was produced.

For those compliers, fertility fell and child survival improved. An additional year of reform-induced schooling reduced the number of children among women by about 0.28, raised the probability of having no children by 2.17 percentage points, and reduced the share of children ever born who were no longer living. The fertility reduction was larger among Indigenous and rural women. These outcomes make the beyond-wages claim concrete: schooling changed household composition and survival, not only a worker’s position in a pay distribution.

Work changed along more than one dimension. Employment gains were largest among Indigenous individuals, while the most consistent labour-market shift was away from agriculture and toward more diversified sectors such as manufacturing and services. The study’s data do not provide a clean causal earnings estimate, but they do show that reform-induced schooling affected participation and occupational allocation. That distinction matters in places where a person can be working before and after education while the sector, hours, or range of available jobs changes.

Mobility was similarly reshaped rather than simply increased. Recent moves across state and municipal boundaries became more likely, while the estimate for living outside one’s state of birth was negative but weakened by placebo evidence and the cumulative nature of the measure. The most defensible interpretation is that schooling was associated with more adaptive recent mobility, not that it made people uniformly more mobile or eliminated permanent displacement. Education changed the composition of responses to opportunity; it did not prescribe one geographic outcome.

The chain reaches the next generation through observed enrolment. One additional year of parental schooling increased children’s secondary enrolment by about 3–4 percentage points and upper-secondary enrolment by about 5–8 points, with especially pronounced effects in small rural localities. The result is strongest at the thresholds where both generations faced meaningful educational constraints. It shows that a policy affecting one cohort can alter a child’s schooling probability decades later, even though it does not guarantee completed education, tertiary attendance, or higher income.