Ethnic Origin, Class Origin and Educational Attainment in Canada: Further Evidence on the Mosaic Thesis

In this paper, we extend the analysis of status attainment in Canada in three key ways. First, we treat education, not as an intervening or control variable in the status attainment process, but as an important dependent variable in its own right. Second, we use recent representative national survey data to compare the relative effects of ethnic origin and class origin on status attainment, using education as the attainment measure. Third, we examine ethnicity and class effects on education while determining if these effects differ for foreign-born and native-born Canadians. The results, both with and without controls on other variables, indicate that ethnicity has a significant influence on educational attainment. However, the ethnicity effect is weak compared to the effects of three class-related background measures: mother’s education, father’s education, and father’s occupation. The three class variables account for a large portion of the ethnic differences in education, and explain much more of the variance in educational attainment than do ethnicity or the various controls. There are also notable differences in how ethnic groups rank on education, when foreign-born and native-born respondents are considered separately. The implications of the findings for future research on status attainment in Canada are briefly discussed.