Publication: The Straits Times, p D2&D4 Date: 16 July 2011 Headline: A fair starting line?

I ? SMU

In studies of sodal mobility. a tranr[Han matrix can be used to measure the ehaees of someone moving up or down fmm hi mi-gnp.-i University of Sinsapore social wo* assistant pmfessw Irene Ng developed the lnost merit available one, based on results of aH102youthsuwey.there~ults arRpresentedbelow.Ywthpre Bvided into fou proups: hwn

FAIR youths' chams of moving up an incomegroup ("Up lste~'?, down an income goyr ("Down 1 step") or staying put (Ttay put") in their paents' income gmlps are listed in the chat below. STARTING (Youth whcse parents an in b

25 per cent of income pmup)

NE? Rapid development may have propelled widespread growth of incomes and educational and occupational attainment in the past, but Singapore may have come to a stage where it needs to contend with

the question of relative mobility. Studies have show that 58 per cent of the economic advantage that high-income parents have is being passed on to their children. Is Singapore doing enough to mitigate the disadvantage of being born into a poorer, less -educated family?

Kuan asked how many parents of pupils in the top 5 per cent of each PSLE cohort send their children for tuition and other supplementary classes.

They said the answers are needed to give a complete picture of the opportuni- tv structures here. Yet they have not been revealed.

how hard you will striven to improve your circumstances.

But improving relative mobility also has a less-talked-about downside: It re- duces the chances that well-off parents can transfer their social and economic edge to their children.

The exercise - whether in the form of

Upperm- UP 1 SkP -- 22%

stay* i- m r c Down lstep 26% Down2 steps 22%

DRIVER Mohamed Ionid. SO, dropped out at Secondary 2. He raised four children on his $2.000 monthly salary.

Three of them - a daughter and two sons - who com~leted their studies at pol-

But just what does social mobility mean? SOCIAL mobility reflects how easy it is for people to break out of their parents' socioeconomic status or improve their own lot. This can be done through chang- es in occupation, education or income.

But to get the true picture. ~ociologists and economists say the key distinction be- tween absolute and relative mobility needs to be made.

Absolute mobiity occurs when individ- uals get a higher income or education than before, or compared with their par- ents. It can exist in s society that is at the same t i i e highly stratified, so those in the lowest income bracket can be trapped on its lowest rung despite earning higher salaries over ti ie.

progressive income taxes, estate duties or needs-based scholarships - casts the spotlight on class tensions as each group jostles to get ahead or maintain its lead in the social hierarchy.

Such pressure was less evident in Sin- ytechnic and 1nGitute of Technical ~ & c a - tion level have found iobs as a nurse, tech- gapore'searly years when rapid develop-

ment helped lift overall incomes and edu- nician and boutique salesman respective- cational and occupational attainment. But as the heated debate during the re- ly. But his hopes are most invested in

13-year-old HeSfy, now in Sec I, who he thinks has the smarts to go the Mhest. "He has more ideas than other children his age," says the proud father, who wants his youngest son to land a job that pays twice, if not more, than what he cur- rently makes.

"If he can study at a higher level, I want him to study at the higher level. If I have no money, I will borrow from people so that he can study." he says.

It's the quintessential Singapore Dream: getting your children to exceed your lot in We. Yet this dream of social mobility also fils parents with anxiety in today's fast-paced environment, where the costs and achievement benchmarks are constantly being raised. The country demands better credentials from its work- force aU the time, says Mr Mohamed. "We cannot lag behind."

In lanuary. this anxiety bubbled over when then Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew noted that at least 20 per cent of fa- thers of students in elite schools like Raf- fles Institution and Anglo-Chinese School (Independent) were university graduates, while the equivalent figure was around 10 per cent for neighbour- hood schools like lurong West Secondary and Bukit Merah Secondary.

The stark picture of stratification caused an outcry, fuelling resentment among parents disenchanted by what they felt was an elitist school system.

Then Education Minister Ng Eng Hen revealed more statistics in March show- ing that about half the students in the bot- tom third of the socioeconomic bracket score in the top two-thirds of their co- hort during the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE).

While that assuaged some concerns, it also raised other questions from the pub- lic and academics.

Singapore Management University (SMU) sociologist Chung Wai. Keung wanted to know how students from high- er income brackets f a d .

Straits Times reader Cheong Tuck

cent general election showed, itcould be gnWng prominence now.

Economist Ho Kong Weng from the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) says: "If Singapore is maturing to a steady state, like an advanced country, its economic growth rate will diminish. The distributional problem will be more obvious, and inequality and mobility will become more important."

Singapore's score card EARLY published attempts to study so- cial mobility, beginning in 1991, tended

Up 2 steps 28%

UP 1 *P 23%

Downlstep 27%

Relative mobility refers to the ease of moving UD and down the social ladder. This &I be harder to assess as bench- marks of socioeconomic standing change over time.

Children of parents with Primary 6 qualifications, for example. may not achieve relative mobility despite acquir- ing polytechnic diplomas if the education- al benchmarks have been raised for their generation.

Developing countries tend to focus more on improving absolute mobility to meet basic needs like food, housing and health care.

la advanced economies with slower rates of growth and h i i e r standards of living, intergenerational relative mobility comes to the fore. This is because it is closely associated

with how fair a society is and how good it is at mitigating the disadvantage that low-income families pass on to their next generation in the form of poorer nutri- tion, inferior education and reduced job prospeds:.

The Br~tuih government, for example,

to focus on the riie in occupational status and educational attainment of Singapore- - . MS.

In recent times, researchers have at- tempted to measure social mobility by cal- culating the extent to which parents are able to-pass on their economic or educa- tional advantage to their children.

Income mobility. for example, is mea- sured bv calculatinn the extent to which parents'income has-a bearing on the eam- inns of their children. This "elasticitv" is

Bottom (Youth whose parents are in bottom 25 per cent of income group)

expressed as a figure between 0 i d 1, with a score of 0 implying that patents' incomes absolutely do not determine what their children earn.

While direct international compari- sons are hard to make because of varying survey samples and methods, studies by Dr Ng from the NUS have shed some light.

Using data on fully employed youth aged 23 to 29 and adjustfng the calcula- tion to make it comparable with that of older adults, Dr Ng found in 2007 that Singapore had an intergenerational in- come elasticity of 0.58. This means that 58 per cent of the income advantage of parents was being passed onto their chil- dren. Thii put it roughly on a par with the

United States', which various studies have found to be in the region of 0.5, but

UPS* - .- Up 2 steps -- Un 1 sten

said in an ~ ~ r i l strategy paper on social mobility that "an unfair society is one in which the circumstances of a person's birth determine the life he goes on to lead".

It added: *For any given level of skill and ambition, regardless of an individu- al's background. everyone should have an equal chance of getting the job he wants or reaching a higher income bracket."

Closer to home, National University of Sigapore (NUS) social work academic Irene Ng says "it affects your aspiration.

Source: The Straits Times O Singapore Press Holdings Limited. Permission required for reproduction.

2 SMU Publication: The Straits Times, p D2&D4 Date: 16 July 2011 Headline: A fair starting line?

School system, income gap are l ev factors less mobile than Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Denmark, which typical- ly score below 0.3. Hong Kong, in a study released last year, registered Q.4.

Meanwhile, parental income and edu- cation affect chddren's educational aspira- tions as well as how long they stay in school, according to a study by NTU's Dr Ho which was published last year.

Among other things, the assistant pro- fessor founq that every additional year of schooling by parents raised their chil- dren's educational aspiration by about 72 days.

If a parent earns an additional $1,000 monthly on top of his regular income, the child stays in school for about 32 days more. Fathers were also found to have a greater influence than mothers on their children's education aspirations and at- t ainment .

But more research needs to be done on this subject, say academics.

Dr Ng notes that, unlike their col- leagues in the US, Europe or even Hong Kong, academics here do not have ready access to detailed socioeconomic data that tracks the progress of individual farn- ily members in a consistent manner over time.

This information also needs to be col- lected from individuals spanning the en- tire income spectrum to allow research- ers to accurately estimate how easy it is for individuals born to specific income groups to move up or down to another in- come group.

Only then would Singapore know for sure if it is improving or sliding on the score of mobility.

Dark clouds ahead? YET even without clear figures, there are warning signs that increasing stratifica- tion could occur.

For one thing, inequality - which inter- national researchers have observed to cor- relate with social immobility - has been trending upwards in the past decade.

Singapore's Gini coefficient, a mea-

sure of income inequality between 0 and 1, has risen from 0.43 in 2000 to 0.452 last year, in spite of government trans- fers.

The gap in earnings between the high- est -earning and lowest -earning house- holds has grown. In 2000, the average in- come of the top 20 per cent of households was 10.1 times that of the bottom 20 per cent of households. By last year, it had grown to 12.9 times.

The widening income gap could make it harder for poorer families to keep up when it comes to investing in their chil- dren's education. And this expenditure is sizeable in Singapore.

According to the 2007/2008 House- hold Expenditure Survey, households spent about1$820 million a year on cen- tre- and home-based tuition, a 42 per cent jump from 10 years ago.

The same survey revealed that, on aver- age, the top 20 per cent of households by income spent over five times more on pri- vate tuition and other educational cours- es every month than the bottom quintile.

It's a bruising parental arms race to put their children ahead of the pack.

Economist James Vere, who studies so- cial mobility at the University of Hong Kong, tells The Straits Times: "Wealthy families are willing to put a lot of resourc- es into securing advantages for their chil- dren, and you can't really stop them.

"The only thing we can really do is to make sure we take care of the children in the public (education) system."

But public education per se is not a panacea - the overall system itself makes a bigger difference.

A report by the Organisation for Eco- nomic Cooperation and Development (OECD) last year notes that the practice of differentiating what students learn at an early stage - through streaming, for ex- ample - tends to be associated with larg- er socioeconomic inequalities. It also tends to come without gains in average student performance.

The conclusion was similar to that of a Finnish study. It found intergenerational income mobility improved by 23 per cent when the country delayed the age when

students were sorted into vocational and academic tracks and instead made all stu- dents undergo nine years of uniform schooling.

Meanwhile, tentative OECD evidence indicates that increasing social mix with- in schools "could increase the relative per- formance of disadvantaged students, without any apparent negative effects on overall performance".

The findings have implications for Sin- gapore, which liberalised its education system gradually from 1987 to stretch its most able students and expand vocational options,for the less academically inclined.

High-achieving students can now choose from a whole gamut of schools, be they elite independent institutions, auton- omous ones or those that run the integrat- ed programme allowing students to skip the 0-level exam.

This and the concentration of many top schools in relatively wealthy neigh- bourhoods have raised questions about whether the education system is calcify- ing social divides.

Small things add up. NTU's Dr Ho says that even the practice of primary schools admitting pupils on the basis of their parents' volunteer work contributes to social immobility. Low-income par- ents struggling to make a living simply do not have the time or resources to volun- teer their services.

A matter of choice YET for all the research that has been done on mobility, academics agree that there is no magic number or an ideal state to aim for.

The levers of relative. mobility lie not only in the country's education system but also its employment, economic and welfare structures. For example, how em-

ployers value someone who goes to uni- versity later in life could affect his or her children's chances of success later on.

Professor Diane Reay from the Univer- sity of Cambridge adds that how a society distributes the fruits of economic develop- ment among employers, workers and oth- er groups is also crucial. If they go dispro- portionately to the rich, they lower mobil- ity. Turning each of these levers involves

complex trade-offs. Singapore officials, for example, have defended the liberal- ised education system on the basis of the need to challenge the best and brightest, those that should later lead the charge of growing the economic pie for all.

While it's unlikely this approach will be rolled back, the Finnish study raises questions about what can be done to make sure children who missed the first cut are not hobbled for life.

Likewise, academics like Professor MukuI Asher from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy have warned that Singapore's stringent, means-testing ap- proach to handouts and its single-tier re- tirement saving structure are inadequate and contribute to the inequality that may hamper social mobility.

The state, however, has maintained it cannot afford the generous transfers that Scandinavian countries - which fare much better on relative mobility - give their people.

Yet, just as there are costs involved in creating fairer opportunity structures, so- cial immobility comes with its own costs.

Like it or not, Singaporeans may soon have to rethink the kind of social barriers they are willing to live with in exchange for prosperity. And figure out jus\ how much they are willing to pay to keep the Singapore Dream alive for their children. Htmhy@sphcon.%

Source: The Straits Times O Singapore Press Holdings Limited. Permission required for reproduction.

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