French Immersion and Labour Market Earnings

This paper provides the first estimates of the difference in earnings between former Canadian French immersion (FI) students and their non-immersion counterparts. Using data from the 2021 Canadian Census of Population, it is found that former FI students earned approximately 16 percent more in 2020 than non-FI students with similar demographic characteristics. Among subgroups of the population who studied FI, it is the English as a second language (ESL) immigrants, mid-career workers, women, and residents of Canada's eastern provinces that are found to have the largest earnings advantages over otherwise similar non-FI students. Former FI students who self-report that they do not know French are also found to earn more than their non-FI counterparts. Despite the FI earnings advantage, it is found that the entire earnings gap could be explained by an unobserved confounder, such as parental investment or degree of learning difficulty, that explains 2.9 percent of the variation in both FI enrollment and earnings potential that remains after demographic characteristics have been taken into account. If the unobserved component of earnings is as imbalanced across FI and non-FI students as Indigenous status, the FI earnings advantage would be reduced to approximately 4.6 percent. These exercises indicate that the causal effect of FI on future earnings is likely to be small, and zero effect cannot be ruled out as implausible.