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Mobility Report Cards of Colleges in Korea: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility and Maintenance of Economic Status

Subin Lee 1,  SEONGSOO CHOI 2

1성균관대학교
2연세대학교

Excellent Accredited

ABSTRACT

We evaluate the role of Korean colleges in intergenerational mobility and reproduction of economic status, extending Raj Chetty et al.’s (2017) study based on the administrative data of the United States. Using data from Graduate Occupational Mobility Surveys (2005- 2015), we estimate the rates of intergenerational upward mobility and reproduction across 17 college groups, which we define by whether they are public or private, institutional selectivity, geographic location, and whether they are a four-year or two-year college. The results can be summarized as follows; First, colleges generally show lower upward mobility rates than the expected levels, which suggests they are failing to play their roles as a key social mobility channel. Second, the most selective universities and public universities are the two college groups that meet the expected mobility rates. They also have higher mobility rates than low-tier non-selective counterparts do. This finding contrasts with the cases in US where selective elite colleges have comparatively very low rates of upward mobility. Third, public universities and two-year colleges show reasonably high upward mobility rates and relatively low maintenance rates, which indicates that they contribute better to social mobility, compared with private institutions. Status maintenance rates are the highest among the most selective institutions. Despite their relatively high mobility rates, those universities turn out to contribute more to reproduction of the status than to mobility. Fourth, two-year colleges show the rising trend of mobility rates over the past decade largely due to their low-income graduates’ rising success rates. This result suggests that policy attention needs to be shifted to these institutions to promote their potential as the channel for mobility, which has been relatively overlooked due to exclusive focus on elite institutions. Lastly, both mobility rates and maintenance rates are significantly higher for men than for women across all college groups, and such female disadvantages are more remarkable for women from low-income families and graduates of non-selective institutions. This highlights that women with low-income families are doubly disadvantaged and that the opportunities to move up the ladder for mobility through college education are given almost exclusively to men.

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