Mexico’s longer school requirement changed family life and children’s schooling

A 1993 reform increased education, reduced fertility and child mortality, and helped more children stay in school.

Editorial illustration — not from the study.

The reform extended compulsory education from six to nine years, creating differences in schooling exposure between nearby birth cohorts. Researchers used this change to estimate the effects of additional schooling across people’s lives, including fertility, child mortality, employment, the sectors where people worked and geographic mobility.

The study also linked parents and children within census households to examine whether education carried into the next generation. It finds that the reform’s education gains were largest among Indigenous people and rural populations, where schooling levels were lowest before the reform.

How schooling changed lives

The reform increased educational attainment across all groups. Among Indigenous people, literacy rose by 4.5 percentage points and completion of lower-secondary school rose by 3.8 percentage points, from starting levels of 78% and 29%, respectively.

The additional schooling was associated with lower fertility, reduced child mortality and higher employment. It also shifted workers away from agriculture and toward higher-productivity sectors. An additional year of parental schooling increased children’s probability of enrolling in secondary school by 3 to 4 percentage points and in upper-secondary school by 5 to 8 percentage points.

Why the effects spread

The findings show that a compulsory-schooling policy can affect more than years spent in school. In Mexico, the reform was followed by changes in family size, child survival and work, while its strongest education effects reached groups that had faced greater barriers to secondary schooling. The higher enrolment among children of more-educated parents also indicates that the reform’s effects extended into the next generation.

Evidence and caveats

The study uses a regression discontinuity and instrumental variable analysis of Mexico’s 2020 Census, taking advantage of the birth-cohort difference created by the 1993 reform. This design is intended to identify the causal effects of the added schooling, rather than simple differences between people with more and less education.

The abstract does not report the full sample size or all design details, so the precision and broader generalizability of individual estimates cannot be assessed here. The findings are specific to Mexico’s reform and the populations and outcomes measured in the census.

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