Degrees of difference: Social inequalities in graduates' job opportunities in the UK and Germany

In 2011, the UK White Paper 'Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: A Strategy for Social Mobility' recognised that 'there is a long way to go' for the achievement of a fair society in which every individual can achieve their potential, irrespective of their family circumstances (Cabinet Office, 2011:5). It also acknowledged that individuals from advantaged socio-economic backgrounds continue to be more likely to enter high-paid professional and managerial occupations than individuals from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. We refer to these as 'top-level' occupations; examples include doctors, lawyers or managers in large organisations

Patterns of Absolute and Relative Social Mobility: a Comparative Study of England, Wales and Scotland

We use the British Household Panel Study to analyse change over birth cohorts in patterns of social mobility in England, Scotland and Wales. In several respects, our conclusions are similar to those reached by other authors on the basis of wider comparisons. There has been a large growth in non-manual employment since the middle of the twentieth century. This led first to a rise in upward mobility, but, as parents of younger people have now themselves benefited from that, has more recently forced people downward from their middle-class origins. These changes have largely not been a growth in relative social mobility: it is change induced by the occupational structure. The conclusions apply both to current class and to the class which people entered when they first entered the labour market. The patterns of relative mobility could not be explained statistically by measures of the respondents\' educational attainment. The conclusions were broadly the same for the three countries, but there was some evidence that in the youngest cohort (people born between 1967 and 1976) experience of people from Wales was diverging from that of people from England and Scotland, with rather greater amounts of downward mobility. There were two methodological conclusions. Out-migration from country of birth within the UK did not seem to make any important difference to our results. That is encouraging for analysis of surveys confined to one of the three countries, because it suggests that losing track of out-migrants would not distort the results. The second methodological conclusion is that the comparative study of social mobility can find interesting topics to investigate at social levels lower than that of the state, here the comparison of the three countries which make up Britain.Social Mobility; Comparative Research; British Household Panel Study; Loglinear Modelling

School subject choices and social class differences in entry to higher education : comparing Scotland and Ireland

The existing literature on differentiation in secondary education and its consequences for social inequalities in educational attainment has mainly focused on students’ assignment into different formal school tracks (e.g. Bol et al. 2014; Brunello and Checchi 2007; Hanushek and Wößmann 2006; Horn 2009; Horn 2013). With a few exceptions (Ayalon 2006; Iannelli 2013; Van de Werfhorst, Sullivan and Cheung 2003), social stratification research has largely neglected the role of internal differentiation within secondary schools, such as allocation to, or take-up of, different subjects, in shaping social inequalities in life course outcomes

Higher education selection: implications for social inequality. ESRI Research Bulletin 2016/1/1

Supporting the transition from school to higher education (HE) has been a focus of the Irish educational policy agenda in recent years, with changes in the nature of Leaving Certificate grading and many HE institutions moving to more general entry routes (rather than highly specialised courses) . How best to select students for different courses and institutions is an important dimension of this debate. This bulletin documents new analyses which use the different approaches to HE selection in Ireland and Scotland to yield insights into this important policy issue. The findings are based on data from the Irish and Scottish School Leaver Surveys over the period 1987 to 2005. The subsequent discontinuation of both national surveys means that we cannot analyse patterns over the past decade. However, while the level of participation of different social groups will have changed, the underlying social processes are unlikely to have altered fundamentally

Different degrees of career success:Social origin and graduates’ education and labour market trajectories

Most research on social inequalities in higher education (HE) graduates’ labour market outcomes has analysed outcomes at one or two points in time, thus providing only snapshots of graduates’ occupational destinations. This study contributes to the existing literature by examining the education and labour market trajectories of degree holders across their life course and how these trajectories vary by social class of origin. We analyse data from the 1970 British Cohort Study and employ sequence analysis, followed by cluster analysis, to identify HE graduates’ typical trajectories. We assess the degree of social inequalities in the chance of following more or less advantaged pathways from age 16 up to the age of 42 and the extent to which these inequalities are explained by differences in higher education experiences. The results show that graduates from lower social classes of origin have more diverse and less stable trajectories, are less likely to enter top-level jobs in their 20s and more likely to enter and remain in lower social classes than their more socially advantaged counterparts. The age at which people graduate from HE emerges to be a key factor in explaining some of these patterns. Interestingly, HE factors - such as class of degree, fields of study and type of university attended - only partially explain social class differences. Our research provides new insights into the dynamic nature of inequalities among graduates showing that not only does the final destination matter but also the timing and sequencing of spells within the trajectories are important