'The first in our family to go to university'

It means a lot to be able to say that, so I was very pleased to see this editorial in the Globe this morning:

The first in the door: It's not a massive expenditure, but the symbolism is important. Ontario has announced that it will spend $5-million on its program to promote higher education among teens whose parents did not themselves have a postsecondary education. Universities, colleges and community organizations will use the money to reach out to students and help them become the first in their family to continue their studies past high school. Another $1-million will be set aside in 2006-07 for "first generation" bursaries.

This is an excellent idea. This graph from Alex Usher's paper 'The Price of Knowledge' (pdf) may seem surprising at first glance, but of course it shouldn't be:

More than half of the people who went to university made that decision before they were 15 years old. Once you've made that decision, it makes sense to put in the effort to get the marks necessary.

At that age, kids aren't doing present-value calculations; the biggest single influence is the example set by their parents. In a study done for  StatsCan, my former colleague Ross Finnie found that

[p]arental education has uniformly strong direct and indirect effects on access. Each additional year of parental education increases the likelihood of university attendance (where the effects are strongest) as much as about five percentage points. The relative university attendance rates for those whose parents have a high school diploma and those with at least some university education are 29 versus 53 percent in the case of men, and 37 versus 65 percent for women (holding other factors constant). Parental education has another interesting property: father’s education seems to have a much stronger effect on sons than daughters, while mother’s education has a much greater influence over daughters than sons.

Probably the single best way to increase educational attainment levels is to target kids who haven't considered university as a serious option. Not because they aren't smart enough, or because their family isn't rich enough - but because they don't know anyone who has been to university.

Comments

[Josh Markle]

Quick question: is Finnie controlling for income?

I was the first in my family too.

[Stephen Gordon]

In that study, he didn't have income data. There is of course a positive correlation between parents' income and university education, but it turns out that this correlation can largely be explained by the fact that highly-educated parents typically have higher incomes. Once you control for educational attainment, the extra explanatory power of inceom per se is marginal.

[thebizofknowledge]

I agree with you that this is most decidedly an excellent idea! Students learn by example, and when the example is NOT to attend college, they often fall into an established family pattern, not really recognizing that they may forge a new path for themselves and their own future children!