Outsmarting your parents: Being a first‐generation learner in developing countries

We use data from the Young Lives surveys, in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam, to highlight an underappreciated phenomenon—that a substantial proportion of students in developing countries are the first in their families to go to school. We term these students first‐generation learners (FGLs). We both propose a simple “static” definition of FGL status—where a child’s parents have no education attainment—and utilize the panel dynamics of the Young Lives data set to look at a “dynamic” definition—where the child, in any given round of data collection, is enrolled at a level which his or her parents did not reach. We show descriptive statistics on the scale of this problem across the four countries. We find strong, consistent patterns of relative educational deprivation for FGLs. We tentatively explore the pathways through which FGL status may affect outcomes and find possible explanations through an inability to support with homework and lower aspirations. We look at how becoming an FGL affects the probability of being in school using child fixed‐effects estimations and find it increases the vulnerability of children to drop out.