SMU

I ?

Publication: The Straits Times, p D2&D4

Date: 16 July 2011
Headline: A fair starting line?

In studies of sodal mobility.

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

FAIR
STARTING
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 s h o w 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?
how hard you will striven to improve
your circumstances.
But improving relative mobility also
has a less-talked-about downside: It reduces the chances that well-off parents
can transfer their social and economic
edge to their children.
The exercise - whether in the form of
progressive income taxes, estate duties or
needs-based scholarships - casts the
But just what does
spotlight on class tensions as each group
social mobility mean?
SOCIAL mobility reflects how easy it is jostles to get ahead or maintain its lead in
the
social hierarchy.
for people to break out of their parents'
Such pressure was less evident in Sinsocioeconomic status or improve their
own lot. This can be done through chang- gapore'searly years when rapid development helped lift overall incomes and edues in occupation, education or income.
But to get the true picture. ~ociologists cational and occupational attainment.
and economistssay the key distinction be- But as the heated debate during the retween absolute and relative mobility cent general election showed, itcould be
gnWng prominence now.
needs to be made.
Economist Ho Kong Weng from the
Absolute mobiity occurs when individuals get a higher income or education Nanyang Technological University (NTU)
says:
"If Singapore is maturing to a
than before, or compared with their parents. It can exist in s society that is at the steady state, like an advanced country,
same t i i e highly stratified, so those in its economic growth rate will diminish.
the lowest income bracket can be trapped The distributional problem will be more
on its lowest rung despite earning higher obvious, and inequality and mobility will
become more important."
salaries over tiie.
Relative mobility refers to the ease of
moving UD and down the social ladder. Singapore's score card
This &I be harder to assess as bench- EARLY published attempts to study somarks of socioeconomic standing change cial mobility, beginning in 1991, tended
to focus on the riie in occupational status
over time.
Children of parents with Primary 6 and educational attainment of Singapore- .
qualifications, for example. may not MS.
In
recent
times,
researchers
have
atachieve relative mobility despite acquiring polytechnic diplomas if the education- tempted to measure social mobility by calal benchmarks have been raised for their culating the extent to which parents are
able to-pass on their economic or educageneration.
Developing countries tend to focus tional advantage to their children.
Income mobility. for example, is meamore on improving absolute mobility to
meet basic needs like food, housing and sured bv calculatinn the extent to which
parents'income has-a bearing on the eamhealth care.
la advanced economies with slower inns of their children. This "elasticitv" is
rates of growth and h i i e r standards of expressed as a figure between 0 i d 1,
living, intergenerationalrelative mobility with a score of 0 implying that patents'
comes to the fore.
incomes absolutely do not determine
This is because it is closely associated what their children earn.
with how fair a society is and how good it
While direct international compariis at mitigating the disadvantage that sons are hard to make because of varying
low-income families pass on to their next survey samples and methods, studies by
generation in the form of poorer nutri- Dr Ng from the NUS have shed some
tion, inferior education and reduced job light.
Using data on fully employed youth
prospeds:.
The Br~tuihgovernment, for example, aged 23 to 29 and adjustfng the calculasaid in an ~ ~ rstrategy
i l
paper on social tion to make it comparable with that of
mobility that "an unfair society is one in older adults, Dr Ng found in 2007 that
which the circumstances of a person's Singapore had an intergenerational inbirth determine the life he goes on to come elasticity of 0.58. This means that
lead".
58 per cent of the income advantage of
It added: *For any given level of skill parents was being passed onto their chiland ambition, regardless of an individu- dren.
al's background. everyone should have an
Thii put it roughly on a par with the
equal chance of getting the job he wants United States', which various studies
or reaching a higher income bracket."
have found to be in the region of 0.5, but
Closer to home, National University of
Sigapore (NUS) social work academic
Irene Ng says "it affects your aspiration.
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 opportunitv structures here. Yet they have not
been revealed.

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~letedtheir studies at polytechnic and 1nGituteof Technical ~ & c a tion level have found iobs as a nurse, technician and boutique salesman respectively.
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 currently 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 workforce 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 fathers of students in elite schools like Raffles Institution and Anglo-Chinese
School (Independent) were university
graduates, while the equivalent figure
was around 10 per cent for neighbourhood 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 showing that about half the students in the bottom third of the socioeconomic bracket
score in the top two-thirds of their cohort during the Primary School Leaving
Examination (PSLE).
While that assuaged some concerns, it
also raised other questions from the public and academics.
Singapore Management University
(SMU) sociologist Chung Wai. Keung
wanted to know how students from higher income brackets f a d .
Straits Times reader Cheong Tuck

youths' chams of moving up an

incomegroup ("Up lste~'?,
down
an incomegoyr ("Down 1step")
or staying put (Ttay put") in their
paents' incomegmlps are listed

in the chat below.

(Youth whcse parents an in b

25 per cent of income pmup)

Upperm22%

UP-1S k P
-

stay*
Down lstep

i-m r c
26%

Down2 steps

22%

Up 2 steps

28%

UP 1 *P

23%

Downlstep

27%

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

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

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 e v factors
sure of income inequality between 0 and
1, has risen from 0.43 in 2000 to 0.452
last year, in spite of government transless mobile than Scandinavian countries fers.
like Sweden and Denmark, which typicalThe gap in earnings between the highly score below 0.3. Hong Kong, in a study est -earning and lowest -earning housereleased last year, registered Q.4.
holds has grown. In 2000, the average inMeanwhile, parental income and edu- come of the top 20 per cent of households
cation affect chddren's educational aspira- was 10.1 times that of the bottom 20 per
tions as well as how long they stay in cent of households. By last year, it had
school, according to a study by NTU's Dr grown to 12.9 times.
Ho which was published last year.
The widening income gap could make
Among other things, the assistant pro- it harder for poorer families to keep up
fessor founq that every additional year of when it comes to investing in their chilschooling by parents raised their chil- dren's education. And this expenditure is
dren's educational aspiration by about 72 sizeable in Singapore.
days.
According to the 2007/2008 HouseIf a parent earns an additional $1,000 hold Expenditure Survey, households
monthly on top of his regular income, the spent about1$820million a year on cenchild stays in school for about 32 days tre- and home-based tuition, a 42 per
more. Fathers were also found to have a cent jump from 10 years ago.
greater influence than mothers on their
The same survey revealed that, on averchildren's education aspirations and at- age, the top 20 per cent of households by
t ainment.
income spent over five times more on priBut more research needs to be done on vate tuition and other educational coursthis subject, say academics.
es every month than the bottom quintile.
Dr Ng notes that, unlike their colIt's a bruising parental arms race to
leagues in the US, Europe or even Hong put their children ahead of the pack.
Kong, academics here do not have ready
Economist JamesVere, who studies soaccess to detailed socioeconomic data cial mobility at the University of Hong
that tracks the progress of individual farn- Kong, tells The Straits Times: "Wealthy
ily members in a consistent manner over families are willing to put a lot of resourctime.
es into securing advantages for their chilThis information also needs to be col- dren, and you can't really stop them.
lected from individuals spanning the en"The only thing we can really do is to
tire income spectrum to allow research- make sure we take care of the children in
ers to accurately estimate how easy it is the public (education)system."
for individuals born to specific income
But public education per se is not a
groups to move up or down to another in- panacea - the overall system itself makes
come group.
a bigger difference.
Only then would Singapore know for
A report by the Organisation for Ecosure if it is improving or sliding on the nomic Cooperation and Development
score of mobility.
(OECD) last year notes that the practice
of differentiating what students learn at
Dark clouds ahead?
an early stage - through streaming, for exYET even without clear figures, there are ample - tends to be associated with largwarning signs that increasing stratifica- er socioeconomic inequalities. It also
tends to come without gains in average
tion could occur.
For one thing, inequality - which inter- student performance.
The conclusion was similar to that of a
national researchers have observed to correlate with social immobility - has been Finnish study. It found intergenerational
income mobility improved by 23 per cent
trending upwards in the past decade.
Singapore's Gini coefficient, a mea- when the country delayed the age when

students were sorted into vocational and

academic tracks and instead made all students undergo nine years of uniform
schooling.
Meanwhile, tentative OECD evidence
indicates that increasing social mix within schools "could increase the relative performance of disadvantaged students,
without any apparent negative effects on
overall performance".
The findings have implications for Singapore, which liberalised its education
system gradually from 1987 to stretch its
most able students and expand vocational
options,forthe less academically inclined.
High-achieving students can now
choose from a whole gamut of schools, be
they elite independent institutions, autonomous ones or those that run the integrated programme allowing students to skip
the 0-level exam.
This and the concentration of many
top schools in relatively wealthy neighbourhoods have raised questions about
whether the education system is calcifying 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 parents struggling to make a living simply do
not have the time or resources to volunteer 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 university later in life could affect his or her
children's chances of success later on.
Professor Diane Reay from the University of Cambridge adds that how a society
distributes the fruits of economic development among employers, workers and other groups is also crucial. If they go disproportionately to the rich, they lower mobility.
Turning each of these levers involves
complex trade-offs. Singapore officials,
for example, have defended the liberalised 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 approach to handouts and its single-tier retirement 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, social 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.