Progress and persistence: race and intergenerational educational mobility in South Africa

How does the role of key inherited circumstances in explaining intergenerational mobility change over time as economies undergo major structural changes? We examine this question in the context of intergenerational educational mobility in South Africa—one of the most unequal countries in the world, where inequality has historically been rooted in a single inherited circumstance: race. Using nationally representative panel data, we estimate both absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility across birth cohorts spanning five decades, covering both the apartheid and post-apartheid periods, and formally decompose mobility into within- and between-race components. We show that educational mobility has risen dramatically, with South Africa now ranking among the most mobile countries in the world. These gains are heterogeneous. Mothers exert stronger intergenerational influence than fathers; daughters, who began with lower mobility, have converged to sons; and mobility has improved most for African Black and Coloured adults. Most importantly, we show that the structure of educational mobility has shifted fundamentally from being historically dominated by between-race differences to now being driven primarily by within-race variation. These findings reflect real progress in dismantling the legacy of apartheid in the country. However, improved educational mobility has not translated into improved broader economic mobility—a disconnect plausibly explained by the interaction between changes to the educational attainment distribution and the structure of labour market returns.