Trends in Inequality of Opportunity: Studying Heritability of Education over Time in the Netherlands

Marjolijn Das , Statistics Netherlands
Mayke Nollet, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Intergenerational transmission is often used as an indicator of inequality of educational opportunity. In this reasoning, resemblance between parents and children stems from family-specific cultural and financial resources of parents which they transmit to their children, giving them an ‘unfair’ advantage or disadvantage in their educational career. However, shared genes are also a major source of resemblance between parents and children, and intergenerational studies cannot distinguish between genetic and (family) environmental influences. This distinction is important however: inequality of opportunity is usually defined as a situation in which children with similar innate capabilities have different educational outcomes as a result of their different environments. Our study employs a twin design to assess trends in genetic (‘heritability’) and environmental influences on educational attainment, using the difference in genetic relatedness of same-sex twins and siblings to parse out the relative influences of genes versus the shared environment. We use population-wide register information from Statistics Netherlands on 27 399 twins and 163 340 siblings of Dutch origin. Over birth cohorts 1964-1997, the influence of the shared environment decreased from 0.33 to zero, whereas heritability increased from 0.07 to 0.71. Hence, educational attainment was increasingly determined by innate capabilities rather than the (family) circumstances. The results strongly suggest an decrease in inequality of opportunity in the Netherlands in these birth cohorts of Dutch origin. Future research should focus on other groups, especially younger cohorts and non-Dutch origin groups.

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 Presented in Session P7. Education, Labor Market, and Economic Issues