When Solène Lardoux and her team at Université de Montréal began analyzing decades of Canadian tax records, they uncovered something that challenges how we think about educational opportunity: a child's access to university isn't just shaped by their parents' income, but by their grandparents' earnings too.
The discovery, published in Canadian Studies in Population, reveals a multigenerational connection that stretches far beyond the traditional family household. By cross-referencing tax returns and census data, the researchers at UdeM's Department of Demography and Population Sciences were able to trace family ties across generations—even when relatives lived in different cities or provinces. This methodological breakthrough moved beyond the conventional definition of a household and opened up a more nuanced picture of how economic advantage flows through families over decades.
The findings are striking: when children from low-income families had grandparents with high incomes, they faced significantly less disadvantage in pursuing postsecondary education, regardless of gender. Lardoux explains that this buffering effect can work in several ways—direct financial assistance, material support, or simply providing a stable family environment that values education. Yet the protection grandparents offer is moderate and diminishes when other factors like parents' education and occupation are taken into account.
What makes this research particularly valuable for Canada is its mirror held up to inequality. Canada is a country with robust social programs and student aid systems designed to level the playing field, yet the study found wide disparities in postsecondary access, especially at the extremes. Young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds still face significant barriers to university, and even substantial grandparental resources cannot fully overcome the compounding effects of low parental income or limited parental education.
Lardoux raises a sobering point: social mobility may be overestimated when researchers look at only two generations. "The cycles seem to carry over across several generations, resulting in long-term transmission of social inequalities," she notes. This suggests that educational disadvantage isn't something that resolves itself in a single generation—it's a pattern that families can inherit, much like wealth itself.
The study does have limitations. Due to confidentiality protocols, researchers could access only 20 percent of tax returns, which restricted their ability to observe the full range of family ties and extended networks. Still, the work points clearly to what's missing in current policy approaches. Lardoux argues that existing programs don't adequately address the accumulated disadvantages that build up within families over time.
She calls for solutions that reduce the degree to which educational trajectories depend on family resources: better support for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, expanded scholarship programs, and policies that more directly support postsecondary access. The research suggests that opportunity in Canada requires looking backward through family history as well as forward to the future. Understanding these multigenerational patterns isn't just academic—it's essential for anyone serious about breaking cycles of inequality.