A chip off the old block or not? An analysis of parents' influence on their children's choice of educational field

Abstract

The intergenerational mobility in education length is well-documented. However, the number of people having a master’s degree in Norway has increased in the past years. An innovative study is instead to investigate the mobility for the educational fields between generations. This thesis is investigating the parents’ influence on their children’s choice of educational fields for higher education. The hypotheses state that increased parental incomes increase the probability of children choosing a similar education as the parents, that the children are more influenced by the parent having the same gender, and that the influence of choosing similar education, self-recruitment, is stronger for prestigious educations. The thesis uses Norwegian register data from Statistics Norway, and the analysis is done by using the multinomial logistic regression, which is directly used through the analytical tool, microdata.no. The average marginal effects of children choosing a similar education as the parents, by changes of either hourly wage or hour spent at work, are interpreting the results. By a wage increase, the results show an increased probability of children choosing a similar education as the parents, and these probability increases are higher for educations of high prestige. However, the results do not confirm the same-gender hypothesis.