New research by Eric Maurin and Sandra McNally reveals that France's short-lived 'revolution' of May 1968 had long-term benefits for the angry students - and later for their children. These findings have important implications for the debate about widening access to higher education.

Maurin, Eric

McNally, Sandra

English

Research Papers in Economics

T
he student revolt of
May 1968 led to chaos
across France,
temporarily shaking the
economic and political
establishment. But
while the revolution was short-lived, it had
significant long-term consequences – 
not only for the students taking 
important exams that year but also for the
next generation. It turns out that the
revolutionaries of 1968 were successful 
in ways that they were unlikely to 
have foreseen.
The famous ‘1968 events’ coincided
with the examination season and, in
universities, exams became a central
aspect of the bargaining process between
students and the authorities. The
rebellious students successfully bargained
for ‘light-touch’ exams ‘to avoid harming
students who have spent a lot of time
struggling for a better university’.
But it was not only university exams
that were affected in 1968. That year, 
the baccalauréat exam – success at which
guarantees entry to university – only
involved oral tests. As a result, as 
Figure 1 shows, the pass rate increased
enormously. 
Our research finds that this lowering
of thresholds at an early – and highly
selective – stage of the higher education
system enabled a significant proportion of
students born between 1947 and 1950
(particularly those born in 1948 and 1949)
to pursue more years of higher education
than would otherwise have been possible.
This was followed by a significant
increase in their subsequent wages and
occupational attainment, particularly for
students from a middle-class family
background. What’s more, because there
is a relationship between parents’
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Baccalauréat
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Figure 1:
Trends in cohort size and the number of students 
passing the baccalauréat exam
Sources:The French Ministry of Education and the French Statistical Office.
The size of the cohort for year t corresponds to the number of people born at t minus
19 (19 is the median age of candidates).The two series are normalised to 1 in 1945.
Children
of the revolution
New research by Eric Maurin and Sandra
McNally reveals that France’s short-lived
‘revolution’ of May 1968 had long-term benefits
for the angry students – and later for their
children.These findings have important
implications for the debate about widening
access to higher education.CentrePiece Summer 2005
17
educational achievement and that of their
children, these returns were transmitted to
the next generation.
These findings are of great relevance
to the current debate in many countries
about widening access to higher
education. The 1968 events are an
important example of a situation where
lower thresholds at critical stages enabled
those on the margin to go to university or
pursue further years of higher education.
The experience of 1968 suggests that
enabling the ‘marginal’ person to enter
higher education can result in high private
returns in the labour market and, because
this is transmitted to the next generation,
may have a long-run effect on overall
educational attainment.
We use 1968 as a ‘natural
experiment’ to address key questions
about the effects of education: what is its
true causal impact on labour market
outcomes like the jobs people end up
doing and the wages they earn? And
what is the causal relationship between
the education of parents and that of 
their children?
It is normally very difficult to identify
the causal effects of education on
subsequent outcomes. We estimate the
returns to education using an approach
that involves finding a variable that
predicts years of higher education without
otherwise influencing the outcome
measure such as wages. In this context,
we can use birth cohort as that variable
and also the fact that within the most
affected cohorts (1948 and 1949), there
was a disproportionate effect on the
education of middle-class students.
The essence of our results can be very
simply illustrated using data from the
French Labour Force Survey (l’Enquête
Emploi) on men in their forties. Figure 2
shows the net effect of birth cohort on
the probability of these men having at
least a university diploma and of them
being in an upper-level white-collar job.
The pattern in the data shows a marked
similarity for the two different effects and
provides good prima facie evidence of the
relationship between educational and
labour market outcomes, with a
pronounced upward shift for people born
in 1949.
This 1949 cohort, the one whose
education was most substantively affected
by the 1968 events, comprised students
taking the baccalauréat exam at the end
of their secondary education. And within
this group, middle-class students were
much more likely to be affected. This is
because people from a lower social
background are more likely to leave
education before taking the exam and
people from a higher social background
are more likely to pass the exam even
without the advantage of easier exams. 
We use these facts to estimate the
relationship between wages and years of
higher education using data for the 1949
birth cohort and two control groups that
were much less likely to have been
affected by the relaxation of exam
standards in 1968, namely the 1946 and
1952 birth cohorts. Specifically, belonging
to the 1949 birth cohort is used to predict
years of higher education and thus reveal
the true causal relationship between
education and wages.
The results indicate that each
additional year spent in higher education
increases wages by about 14 percentage
points and the probability of holding a
high-status occupation by 10 percentage
points. These are high estimates and
suggest that the private returns to an
additional year of higher education may
be at least as large as to an additional year
of compulsory schooling.
We can’t say whether employers were
rewarding the ‘human capital’ gains from
additional years of higher education or the
signalling value of these years (and the
educational credentials). But we can say
that enabling the marginal university
entrant to gain years of higher education
led to high private gains. In fact, we
estimate that the effect on wages
corresponds to a gain in permanent
income which exceeds private costs (that
is, forgone earnings) by a factor of 7 and
which exceeds the social costs of one year
of education by an even larger factor. (The
annual cost of higher education in France
is about £4,400 per student.)
We might hypothesise that a similar
group could be affected in this way by
policies designed to widen access to
higher education – to the extent that this
involves some lowering of thresholds and
hence making the system less selective. 
Figure 2:
The net effects of birth cohort on the probability of 
having at least a university diploma and on the probability of
being in an upper-level white-collar position
Cohorts
The returns to an extra
year of higher education
may be at least as large
as to an extra year of
compulsory schoolingWe use a similar approach to analyse
whether the gain in education and
earnings for the affected cohorts had an
impact on the outcomes of their children.
More generally, we use 1968 to address
the important policy issue as to whether
providing additional education to parents
is transmitted to the next generation, thus
breaking the cycle of low intergenerational
mobility that occurs in many countries.
The outcome we consider corresponds
to children’s ‘educational advancement’ at
the age of 15. This describes the
difference between the actual grade of
the adolescent concerned and the normal
grade for his or her age group. France is
one of several countries where grade
repetition is an important phenomenon
(most children repeat at least one grade at
school). Grade repetition is strongly
correlated with other measures of
educational achievement, and
international data show that children who
repeat a grade are likely to obtain much
lower scores in maths, reading or science
at age 15. 
The results show that the benefits
accruing to fathers born in 1948 and 1949
were transmitted to the next generation in
terms of educational advancement. 
The children of fathers who benefited
from the relaxation of exam standards in
1968 were doing significantly better at
school than the children of those born too
early or too late to be affected in the
same way (the 1946 or 1952 birth
cohorts). We use these facts to estimate
the causal relationship between fathers’
education and their children’s educational
advancement, and the results suggest a
strong positive relationship.
But it is unlikely that fathers’
education was the only family resource
affected by the 1968 events. Since
similarly educated men and women are
more likely to marry each other, the
estimated impact of a father’s years of
higher education reflects both the direct
effect of his resources and the indirect
effect of his wife’s resources on the
educational performance of their children.
Our estimates indicate that the true
causal impact of parental education on
children’s outcomes is considerably larger
than is suggested by more descriptive
analysis. Measures to improve family
resources via parents’ education are
therefore an effective way to improve
outcomes for the next generation.
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18
Measures to improve
family resources via
parents’ education 
are an effective way to
improve outcomes for 
the next generation
France’s student
revolutionaries of 1968
were successful in 
ways that they were
unlikely to have foreseen
Eric Maurin is research director at Paris-
Jourdan Sciences Economiques and a
research affiliate of the Centre for Economic
Policy Research. Sandra McNally is a CEP
research fellow and deputy director of the
Centre for the Economics of Education (CEE).
More details on the research discussed here
are in ‘Vive la Révolution! Long Term Returns
of 1968 to the Angry Students’, CEE
Discussion Paper No. 49
(http://cee.lse.ac.uk/cee%20dps/ceedp49.pdf).
The study is also available in French:‘Vive la
Révolution! Les Bénéfices de Long Terme de
Mai 1968’, La République des Idées, Paris
(http://www.repid.com/IMG/pdf/doc-95.pdf).

Children of the revolution.

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