Children of migrants largely close education gap with Dutch peers in one generation

Within one generation, children of migrants largely catch up on their math and language educational disadvantages, Trouw reports. Research shows that children of migrant backgrounds basically learn as quickly as local peers, provided their different starting positions are taken into account. Factors such as cultural differences appear to play no major role in how quickly the children catch up at school.

With each successive generation, 50 to 60 percent of the language and math deficits compared with the rest of the population disappear, according to research on Cito test scores.

The improvement is even larger when researchers account for the different socioeconomic starting positions of many migrant families. When they adjust for the grandparents’ socioeconomic background—such as education level, occupation, and age at first parenthood—70 percent of the math gap and 62 percent of the language gap close within one generation.

Researchers from Maastricht and Rotterdam reached these conclusions by linking historical school records. Test results have been recorded periodically since 1977, and because personal data are also available, the researchers could compare how parents and their children performed on the tests.

The combined dataset ultimately included math and language skills of 27,390 parents and 43,795 children. Of those, 1,130 parents and 1,640 children had a non-European migration background, mainly from Morocco, Turkey, and the former Dutch colonies. The catch-up was largest among Moroccan Dutch, the researchers write in the Journal of Population Economics.

“We see that the difference between migrants and the rest is still very large in the parents’ generation,” author Dinand Webbink, professor of policy evaluation at Erasmus University, told Trouw. “But among the children, only about a third remains. If you extrapolate that trend, the gap would disappear completely within three generations.”

The researchers added a caveat to their own work. They could only conduct the study with data from traditional migrant groups—from Suriname, Morocco, Turkey, and the Antilles, among others—because those groups have been in the Netherlands long enough to study multiple generations. It is therefore unclear whether the same upward mobility applies to more recent asylum migrants.