Multiplicative or compensatory advantage? Multigenerational contribution to grandchildren’s educational success in the Soviet and the post-Soviet contexts

ABSTRACT

Drawing on retrospective data from the Estonian Family and Fertility Survey, this article examines the impact of grandfathers, who reached adulthood in the Estonian Republic before World War II, on their grandchildren’s educational attainment in the late Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia. The article argues that despite the Sovietization policies, the high social position of grandfathers had a positive effect on their grandchildren’s educational attainment, net of parental education and resources. Our results show that the multiplication effect (i.e. the advantage of having highly educated parents is strengthened by grandparents’ resources) prevails over the compensatory one (i.e. the use of advantageous grandparents’ resources to overcome shortage of parental resources), suggesting that social hierarchies and advantages of the pre-Soviet period contribute to the overall and increasing intergenerational inequality in the late Soviet and post-Soviet Estonian society. This conclusion is also supported by finding that respondents with persistently high (across two familial generations and political regimes) social background have the highest probability to attain higher education, while offspring of parents characterized by the loss of grandparents’ high pre-WWII status has very low (and practically non-different from that of descendants of persistently low social background) probability to attain higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Multigenerational social background effect
• grandparents
• multiplication
• compensation
• hidden advantage
• hidden disadvantage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).t

Notes

1 In literature, one can find two terms – multiplication or augmentation – to indicate processes by which one (dis)advantage tends to strengthen another (dis)advantage. To save space, we consistently use only one of them (multiplication) instead of referring to both.

2 While there is little consensus in the literature on the exact definition of cultural capital and cultural mechanisms, there is consensus that cultural capital pertains to more than familiarity with legitimate or ’highbrow’ culture (Lareau and Weininger 2003). Our point of departure is in accordance with approach that differentiates between two ways how cultural mechanisms affect educational success: through signals of familiarity with legitimate culture or through fostering skills that directly enhance educational success (see for example Breinholt and Jæger 2020; Hu and Wu 2021).

3 Researchers more or less agree that there was almost no room to take advantage of (scarce) economic resources under socialism. This consensus is, however, far from being unanimous. Some researchers note that, although higher education was free, the decision to enter university was still costly (for example, Hazans et al. 2008: 722 refers to such direct costs as preparation and bribery, and also forgone earnings).

4 This suggestion is in line with recent evidence showing how people adjust their preferences and behaviour to environmental and institutional conditions, so that these adjustments might persist in subsequent generations. Thus, great importance was found to be attached to education (as a precondition for secure life) by people who experienced diminished opportunities and loss of their material possessions. Becker et al. (2020) demonstrate that forced migrants from eastern Poland after the WWII invested more heavily in human capital in subsequent generations, a behaviour that the authors explain by preferences shifting away from physical, material possessions.

5 For example, it was cultural, not economic resources, that facilitated access to elite schooling that took place even during Soviet time (Põder et al. 2016).

6 Hanley (2001) pointed to the enormous variation in the extent to which state-socialist societies passed from a ‘consolidation’ to an ‘inclusion’ phase, depending on a variety of historical factors. His analysis showed that selection on the basis of political criteria has been reintroduced in Czechoslovakia following the Soviet invasion in 1968.

7 But in a different way for various social groups, according to Tomusk (2000), managerial staff (‘new elites’) was easily able to overcome measures of affirmative action to enable their children to gain access to higher education. He agrees with Giddens (1998), that in ‘Soviet-style’ societies privileged groups were able to transmit advantages to their children. The point made by Szelenyi (1978) about the usefulness of cultural resources for both previous (‘professional’) and new (‘administrative’) elites seems to echo Walder’s idea about the existence of two distinct career paths that lead to a divided elite. One – administrative – path requires both educational and political credentials, while the second -professional – path requires only educational credentials (Walder 1995).

8 We are fully aware that such a cross-sectional sample of respondents only allows analysis on inequality of opportunities for the children’s generation but does not provide a representative sample of G1s’ generation (see Mare 2014; Pfeffer 2014) and we are cautious not to over interpret our findings.

9 A recent critique indicates that self-reported books in the home are subject to sizeable and systematic errors of observation (Engzell 2019). We consider our scale to be sufficiently robust as not to be biased by error of observation, while capturing the major differences in parental cultural participation and their involvement in a child’s studies.

10 Average marginal effects (AMEs) show the average change in the predicted probability of an attainment of higher education by respondents (G3) resulting from a discrete change in the respective independent variable included in the model.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programmeTwinning of research institutions [project YouthLife, grant agreement number 952083].

Notes on contributors

Jelena Helemäe

Jelena Helemäe is a Senior Researcher at Institute of International Social Studies, Tallinn University. Important fields of research are social inequalities, ethnic stratification and labour market. Recent articles have appeared in Comparative Sociology, International Journal of Sociology, East European Politics and Societies.

Ellu Saar

Ellu Saar is Professor of Sociology at Tallinn University. Her main research interests include social stratification and mobility, educational inequalities and lifecourse studies. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Education and Work, European Sociological Review, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Higher Education, European Societies and East European Politics and Society.