Expansion and ascription: trends in educational opportunity in Canada, 1920-1994

Applying cohort methods to data from the 1973 Canadian Mobility Study and the 1986 and 1994 Statistics Canada General Social Surveys, this paper determines whether the dramatic educational expansion of the 1950s and 1960s reduced the effects of parental socio-economic status, gender and language first spoken on educational attainment in Quebec and the rest of Canada. Linear regression models predicting years of schooling and logistic regressions predicting the probability of specific educational transitions are used to separate the effects of expansion and ascription. Consistent with cultural reproduction theory, class-based ascription remains constant over time, but the effects of gender and language, so pronounced in older cohorts, are negligible in more recent cohorts. Although there are some differences in detail, these basic results are similar in Quebec and the rest of Canada.
The twentieth century has witnessed momentous change in the economies and systems of inequality of the more developed countries, and Canada is no exception. Since the turn of the century [...]