Inequality in educational returns in Hungary

Introduction: Previous research and motivations Research on intergenerational social mobility as well as on returns to education has long traditions in Hungary. Already in the communist times, large-scale data collections with observations of ten-thousands of cases, aiming to study these topics have been carried out in the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. The first one for which the micro data are available is from the year as early as 1973; the last one is from 1992. Father-to-son(-daughter)-type mobility analysis by Andorka (1990) reveals marked influence of structural changes behind the observed extensive occupational mobility processes in Hungary. At the same time, social fluidity has also increased, particularly between the time points represented by the data from 1949 and from 1962-64. This means that Hungary has become more open during the period of the communist transformation and the rapid industrialization. This tendency, however, did not continue in the 1970s and onwards. The most recent study on intergenerational class mobility by Róbert and Bukodi (2004) confirms the previous findings, on the one hand, but detects a decrease in social openness in Hungary on the ground of later datasets from 1992 and 2000, on the other hand. The examination of the role of achieved education in the process of intergenerational social mobility is based on the idea of path models by Blau and Duncan (1967). In the statusattainment models social origin has a direct effect on achieved status, on the one hand, and there is an indirect effect how social origin influences social status through education, on the other hand. This means that education is an intervening variable in the course of social mobility; in modern societies, it is considered as the main channel of distributing social rewards. In accordance with the industrialization thesis (Treiman 1970), meritocratic principle is an essential driving force in status attainment process. The ‘increased merit selection’ (IMS) hypothesis (Jonsson 1992) claims that merit becomes the key determinant of individuals’ access to education and to social position. This would allow assuming that the impact of social origin on education declines over time, while the effect of education on social position increases over time. This hypothesis has been tested for several countries. For Hungary, based on the data by the Hungarian Central Statistical Office between 1973 and 1992, the comprehensive paper by Luijkx et al. (2002) applied the classic Blau-Duncan approach of status attainment model and investigated the long-term trends in the effects of social origin on educational attainment as well as in the impact of education on achieved social status. For the previous trend in the effect of father’s occupation and father’s education on offspring’s education (measured in years), they found a marked fall for the influence of father’s occupation for men and a more moderate decrease for women. The impact of father’s education on respondent’s education did not indicate any linear trend over time but turned out more persistent. For the latter trend on status returns to education, the effect of education on respondent’s ISEI score increased