Study finds Korean parents’ background increasingly shapes children’s jobs and pay

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The influence of Korean parents’ occupations on how much their children earn as adults has increased 2.7-fold between two groups of high school graduates separated by just three years, a new study has found.

Researchers say that this indicates how the intergenerational transmission of social class, where parental socio-economic status affects their offspring’s occupational prestige and earnings, has become even more pronounced.

The report, “Does the Ladder Between Classes Still Exist? An Analysis of Intergenerational Occupational Mobility Through Education,” was published by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training, or KRIVET. Researchers followed 1,207 people who graduated high school in 2005 and 1,085 who graduated in 2008, and looked at where they stood eight years after graduation.

After following the cohorts for eight years, researchers found that the figure indicating the influence of parents’ occupational status on their children’s earnings increased approximately 2.7-fold, from 0.09 for the 2005 graduates to 0.24 for the 2008 graduates. 

The impact of parental academic status on the occupational prestige of their offspring also increased approximately 1.7-fold from 0.11 (for the 2005 graduates) to 0.19 (for the 2008 graduates).

The report analyzed data from the Korean Education and Employment Panel I — a longitudinal panel that tracked the same cohort of third-year middle school and high school students from 2004 through 2015 — and the Korean Education and Employment Panel II, which began tracking students starting in their second year of high school in 2016.

Most notably, among the 2008 graduates, parents’ educational status or occupational prestige had a stronger tendency to directly influence their offspring’s occupation and earnings after entering the workforce, regardless of their children’s education level.

When it came to the 2005 graduates, the level of education received by children was how parents primarily influenced the occupation and earnings of their offspring.

In contrast, the educational status and occupational prestige of their parents directly influenced the occupations of the children who graduated in 2008.

However, education remains a central pathway for social mobility, and the report identified private education expenses as the mechanism through which a parent’s socio-economic status influenced the education of their offspring. 

For both cohorts, children’s educational attainment emerged as the factor with the greatest influence on occupational status. The impact of parents’ educational prestige on their children’s educational level was also approximately 1.4 times higher among the 2008 graduate cohort.

A separate survey tracking students starting in their second year of high school in 2016 also confirmed that the higher a parent’s socio-economic status, the greater the family’s expenditure on their children’s education, and the higher their children’s educational attainment.

“Among more recent generations, there is a growing tendency for labor market outcomes to be directly reflected even without formal education, which may have further solidified the structure of class reproduction,” said Ahn Jun-gi, an associate researcher at KRIVET.

To ensure that children start on equal footing, Ahn recommended gradually expanding free education and boosting support for education costs for disadvantaged families. He also called for narrowing gaps in private education through in-school alternatives, such as expanded after-school programs, and through a national, centralized system for providing career and college admissions information.