Intergenerational Mobility of Education in Thailand: Effects of Parents’ Socioeconomic Status on Children’s Opportunity in Higher Education

As a result of the government investment in education opportunity, there has been a remarkable expansion of higher education over the last 50 years in Thailand. Nevertheless, it still remains questionable whether the expansion is accompanied by ensuring equality of opportunity in higher education. Thus, this study, employing the concept of intergenerational mobility, examined both cross-sectional and long-term effects of parents’ socioeconomic status on children’s opportunity in higher education with the nationwide socioeconomic data of 2005 and 2017. The results indicated that although the higher education opportunity increased by approximately 30% during the 12-years period, parents’ socioeconomic status still played a significant role for the increased opportunity. For household factors, the higher education opportunity was significantly lower among children in lower income, large-sized, single-parent, or rural households. For parental factors, that was significantly lower among children with lower educated, unemployed, or informal-sector parents. Particularly for income, the opportunity gap was nearly 13 times between the highest and lowest income households. Furthermore, these patterns were persistent or worse during the 12-years period. Among several policy recommendations that we proposed, a family involvement program, which has been identified as an effective intervention to mitigate the gap in educational attainment caused by socioeconomic differences, should be a prior consideration.