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Scholars of social mobility increasingly study the role of family background in shaping attainment throughout the entire life course. However, research has yet to establish whether the family characteristics influencing early career attainment are the same as those influencing late career attainment. In this research note, I apply an extended sibling correlation approach to analyze brothers' life cycle earnings and family income, using data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. My analysis reveals a near-perfect correlation in the family characteristics that affect attainment at early, mid, and late career stages. This finding has significant implications for how mobility scholars conceptualize the impact of family background across a career. It suggests that family background forms a single, consistent dimension in determining attainment throughout the life course. Further analysis also indicates that the imperfect relationship between current and lifetime income is exclusively driven by within-family processes., (© 2024 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

We analyse social mobility in London and seek to address two paradoxes. Among people living in London, relative mobility, or social fluidity, appears to be remarkably low when compared with other regions of Great Britain. But social fluidity among people who were brought up in London is similar to that of people brought up elsewhere in Britain. This is our first paradox. Furthermore, it is widely held that social fluidity is higher among people with higher levels of education, yet, the proportion of people with a University degree is much higher among people living in London than in any other region: how is this compatible with its relatively low social fluidity? This is our second paradox. We address these puzzles and find that they are largely explained by patterns of migration into and out of London by two groups that have received little attention hitherto in studies of mobility in the capital: International migrants and people who were brought up in London but who no longer live there., (© 2023 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.)

This paper draws on an oral history project which focuses on former coalminers' experiences of education and training. It presents the stories of five participants, all of whom undertook significant programmes of post-compulsory education during or immediately after leaving the coal industry and achieved a degree of social mobility over the course of their working lives. The paper compares and contrasts their experiences with those which now exist in Britain's former coalmining communities which, it is argued, have been substantively attenuated over time, especially for young men. Whilst it is evident that individual choice and motivation can play an important role in helping (or hindering) young people's journeys through education and employment, the central argument of the paper is that individual labour market success lies at the intersection of structure and agency -- although the data presented also demonstrate the extent to which opportunities available to young men in the former coalfields have been diminished by de-industrialisation.

Historically, there remains an underrepresentation of Black women in and en route to the highest levels of organisational leadership. The divide is all the more pronounced in the field of education, one in which women represent a large share of the community. Particularly relevant for Black women is the incongruence between their heightened educational attainment levels compared to their lower status in the organisational pecking order. To advance both theory and research in this domain, social justice leadership theory (SJLT) serves as the framework for this paper, rooted in the context of the United States. This paper explores the multilayered journeys of Black women aspiring to and operating in senior-level leadership roles (i.e. executives, directors, and CEOs) in US-based education, highlighting the unique and intersectional experiences of one Black woman educational leader. Indeed, there is a need to increase collective consciousness about the impact of leadership cultures on Black women, their experiences, their personal and professional choices, and the ensuing ramifications. In addition, the education leadership sector can benefit from the advancement of more research and theory development relevant to the progression of Black women educational leaders in the United States.

This paper examines the relationship between language, (in)visibility, and (im)mobility in racialized spaces, focusing on Finnish, Somali, and Arabic speakers in Sweden. Using a theoretical framework based on hegemonic whiteness and intersectionality, the study explores how multilingual practices and subjectivities intersect with race, religion, gender, and class to shape social visibility and mobility. The research draws on linguistic ethnographic data, including interviews, linguistic landscape documentation, and an analysis of the media discourse. The study finds that while Finnish speakers have become invisible due to assimilation policies, Somali and Arabic speakers are hypervisible in Swedish public spaces and discourse, although Arabic speakers are sometimes, and in relation to other migrants, nearing Swedish whiteness. However, all three languages and their speakers are constrained by a white normativity that reproduces inequality. The paper challenges simplistic notions of mobility/immobility and visibility/invisibility in the context of a changing racial order in Sweden, where whiteness serves as a binary sorting mechanism that perpetuates inequality. Overall, this research sheds light on the complex entanglement of language, visibility, and mobility in white spaces and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the intersectional dynamics of race and language.

The massification of higher education has dramatically changed the association between credentials and jobs in advanced countries, while its impacts in transitional economies have received less academic attention. To address this research lacuna, the paper utilizes rich information from China's national surveys of college graduates from 2003 to 2019 and multiple waves of census data to explore the temporal and spatial effects of tertiary education expansion on college graduates' job sorting. Regression results from the fixed effects model and the two-stage least-squares model indicate that, on the temporal dimension, the higher education expansion has weakened ties between college credentials and quality jobs over the past 20 years. Recent graduates are more likely to work in informal, non-urban, and non-public sectors, and the college earnings premium has also declined. There is a persistent gap in employment outcomes between bachelor's and associate degree holders. On the spatial dimension, the growing enrolment size leads to skill sorting towards low skilled regions. The study argues that the dynamic effects of college credentials may be explained by labour market flexibility and cohort crowding after higher education expansion. This paper calls for a critical reflection on the merit of further massification of higher education in developing economies, regarding its potential impacts on intergenerational inequality and regional inequality.

Examining the entanglement of democracy and social justice in education and the relationship to social mobility, this paper critiques the individualising nature of social mobility in policy discourse as inimical to human flourishing and education as a public good. The rhetoric of social mobility which responsibilises individuals for their success, without due regard to the systemic changes needed to enable this and the societal barriers to social mobility experienced disproportionately by some groups in society, is detrimental to social justice. A conception of education as a pathway to social mobility must be located in a wider vision of civic engagement in a more inclusive and fairer society. Yet civic engagement in education at the local level has been eroded, as illustrated in this paper by the example of an evolving model of school governance in England. As a corporatist, market driven reform, this model exemplifies how local democratic ties between schools and engagement with their communities can be undermined. Social mobility to enable opportunities, access and participation in democratic civic society becomes a fantasy when society is riven with systemic inequalities, lacks the necessary conditions to enable human flourishing and links to community engagement in education for democratic renewal are downplayed.

In 2019 Ofsted introduced cultural capital (CC) into the Early Years Inspection Handbook and defined it as 'essential knowledge' related to 'educated citizenship'. This paper investigates Ofsted's use of CC to critically examine the potential implications for early years work. Due to the feminised nature of early years work, a critical feminist approach is engaged to explore the potential impact of introducing CC into the regulation of the sector. This paper examines the differences between Ofsted's use of CC, CC's theoretical origins, and analyses sector responses. Our contention is that "how" Ofsted have employed CC may represent 'symbolic violence' against the working-class women working in the early years, by further devaluing their habitus and sustaining the stratification of society through forms of capital. This paper is the first to interrogate CC in Ofsted's early years documentation, and will have an international impact for any countries following UK education practices.

Social capital-the strength of an individual's social network and community-has been identified as a potential determinant of outcomes ranging from education to health 1-8 . However, efforts to understand what types of social capital matter for these outcomes have been hindered by a lack of social network data. Here, in the first of a pair of papers 9 , we use data on 21 billion friendships from Facebook to study social capital. We measure and analyse three types of social capital by ZIP (postal) code in the United States: (1) connectedness between different types of people, such as those with low versus high socioeconomic status (SES); (2) social cohesion, such as the extent of cliques in friendship networks; and (3) civic engagement, such as rates of volunteering. These measures vary substantially across areas, but are not highly correlated with each other. We demonstrate the importance of distinguishing these forms of social capital by analysing their associations with economic mobility across areas. The share of high-SES friends among individuals with low SES-which we term economic connectedness-is among the strongest predictors of upward income mobility identified to date 10,11 . Other social capital measures are not strongly associated with economic mobility. If children with low-SES parents were to grow up in counties with economic connectedness comparable to that of the average child with high-SES parents, their incomes in adulthood would increase by 20% on average. Differences in economic connectedness can explain well-known relationships between upward income mobility and racial segregation, poverty rates, and inequality 12-14 . To support further research and policy interventions, we publicly release privacy-protected statistics on social capital by ZIP code at https://www.socialcapital.org ., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

The civil service examination system emerged to strengthen the emperor's power by recruiting political elites through open examinations. Did it, during the early- and mid-Ming dynasty, facilitate intergenerational mobility? Rather than oversimplifying it as a single-stage system of meritocracy, we propose a two-stage evaluation framework. In the first stage, the Metropolitan Exam featured merit-based evaluations and generated credentials necessary for becoming political elites. The subsequent non-eliminating Palace Exam then functioned to assess the students' organizational fit in line with an emperor's political calculations. In particular, those whose families served in the bureaucracy were favored, while those from affluent families were discriminated against. We test this two-stage framework using the records of 12,427 students who passed 46 exams between 1400 and 1580, a period characterizing the heyday of this system. Our empirical findings from the mixed-effect regression models confirm this argument and suggest promising directions for future research., (© 2023 The Authors. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie.)

Widening participation in England has been framed around two primary needs; raising attainment and raising aspiration. Whilst aspiration is complex, policy definitions often frame it in narrow economic terms and see access to higher education as primarily about developing a workforce, the underlying logic being that to improve social mobility that individuals need to "aim higher". Pre-entry work with under-represented groups therefore has tended to adopt a deficit of aspiration approach. There has been extensive critique of the deficit model yet "raising aspirations" still endures in both national and institutional policy. Drawing on sixteen semi-structured interviews with widening participation practitioners in England, this paper considers the alignment between policy and practice. It explores the more complex and nuanced view of aspiration held by practitioners and how this more closely aligns with the theory of possible selves. This paper argues that there are two key issues; a disjuncture between policy and practice and a gap in understanding of the structural issues associated with aspiration. The paper argues that the solution involves a radical rethink of policy that returns to a focus on helping individuals to realise their own individual aspirations and more clearly acknowledges the structural constraints shaping the formation, vocalisation and realisation of aspirations.

This conceptual paper examines reparations as a vital yet under-researched orientation to justice in education. The idea of reparations requires us to understand the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair. It implies that until injustices are actively addressed they can endure in social institutions -- like education -- which also shape lives-to-come. The paper explores material, epistemic, and pedagogic approaches to reparations in education. It argues that attention to reparations can upturn conventional scholarly and political approaches which frame education either as a force of social reproduction or as a track to upward social mobility. Instead, models of reparative justice ask: what sorts of futures of education can emerge from taking seriously the righting of past and present educational wrongs? Injustice is not an inevitability in reparative futures of education: these are new, if challenging, horizons of theory and practice for the field.

This paper deconstructs ways in which the white 'race' of Eastern European pupils and the class determination of their parents in the country of arrival combine to either afford or deny them racialised privileges in British education. Critically reviewing published research on Eastern European pupils in British schools, this article concludes that past understandings of 'white middle-class privilege', developed mostly in research about white middle-class nationals, cannot be applied in the same way to white-middle class migrants. This paper shows that the class and race of white middle-class migrants become re-articulated in school contexts in ways that suggest that, despite being white and middle-class in their home countries, Eastern Europeans cannot be fully white and middle class in the migration setting. Based on these insights, we offer an analytical frame for theorising this observed conundrum, making a contribution to sociology of education, race and migration.

This paper draws on 'diaspora at home', a concept that encapsulates the unique dynamics between Hong Kong and mainland China, as an analytical tool to explore the cross-border experiences of 23 Hong Kong students at 11 universities in mainland China. It empirically ascertains how the made and imposed claims and identifications of these Hong Kong students resulted in inclusion and exclusion as their interactions with their mainland peers and institutions deepened. Specifically, it highlights how their 'diaspora at home' status offered exclusive access to privileged higher education opportunities, preferential treatments and opportunities for upward social mobility. Meanwhile, such a status also resulted in an overwhelming sense of political liability as they unwittingly became 'political tokens' and suspected political subjects amid the increasingly tense political atmosphere between mainland China and Hong Kong. This paper pinpoints the relevance of class and politics in understanding how diasporic groups engage with higher education.

Though various measures of mobility rate for colleges, e.g. bottom-to-top mobility rate, status maintenance rate, and middle-class mobility rate, have been introduced, they have rarely been reviewed together to see the whole picture of intergenerational mobility, particularly in non-Western societies. This paper fills this gap and characterises mobility rates for 17 different college tiers in South Korea using the Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey for 37,552 graduates from 2007 to 2010. It documents two main results. First, mobility rates are higher for males than for females in all three measures, indicating colleges in South Korea are less effective as a social ladder for females. Second, many selective colleges are more likely to play a role as a glass floor than a social ladder due to their lower low-income access, and 'selective public' colleges are the engines of upward social mobility for students from the bottom three quintiles. Though people believe education is the single greatest hope to achieve upward social mobility, these findings cast doubt on the idea that college attendance alone can promote social mobility. This paper does not necessarily identify causal relationships that can be manipulated to improve mobility rates; however, it documents various patterns of interest to policymakers.

Rurality is known to be associated with a number of weaker educational outcomes, from lower attainment through to lower social mobility. This is why so much policy and practitioner focus has been directed at addressing the rurality gap in educational outcomes. In this paper, we use pupil-level data for Scotland to contribute to two dimensions of this problem. First, we explore the relationship between socio-economic deprivation and educational mobility across urban and rural primary schools in Scotland. This provides new insights on the issue of rural disadvantage. Second, we use our dataset to explore the socio-economic makeup of urban and rural schools in Scotland, documenting that schools located in the highest and lowest SIMD areas are more homogeneous than those in the middle. This is important for the classification of schools in targeting educational interventions to improve social mobility.

This paper aims to demonstrate the analytical potential of initial vocational education and training (iVET) in the debate on the costs of social mobility. It is based on extensive qualitative fieldwork with over 250 young people in Romania's iVET (around 20% of whom were Roma). Central to the discourses of young Roma are the experiences of discrimination, the absence of a "vocational habitus" and an awareness of credential inflation, despite the social and economic costs of attending iVET. The research calls for a recalibration of the narrative on social mobility, in an economic context where work is becoming increasingly precarious.

Formal education has all too often been portrayed as a means of achieving social and economic mobility, there is a need to address the unequal footing for adolescents in the Global South attempting to achieve social mobility through education. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Sri Lanka, this article considers the impact of upward mobility-driven discourses of the North on the type of aspirations formed by adolescents in the Global South, and the social implications that arise as a result. Through observation, interviews and focus groups carried out at a secondary school for girls and a private tuition centre in Sri Lanka, the paper considers the value given to private tuition compared to government-funded schooling. In doing so, it examines the implications of mobility-driven discourses on the schooling experiences of adolescents in the Global South, particularly the heightening of educational and social inequalities.

The influence of the International Baccalaureate (IB) has grown impressively on a global scale. In Latin America, the IB has been mainly introduced in private schools that cater for the most affluent sectors of society and, consequently, has been mostly interpreted as contributing to processes of social reproduction and the widening of inequalities However, since the mid-2000s the IB has been promoted in state schools in countries such as Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica and in the City of Buenos Aires in Argentina. This paper analyses the enactment of the IBDP in public schools in Costa Rica and Peru drawing on a mixed methods multiple case study. It shows how, in countries with significant socioeconomic disparities, the possibility of offering the IBDP to students at public schools was mostly justified as a matter of equity, understood as opening access to an educational programme that was only available to the most privileged sectors of society. By problematising the notions of privilege and eliteness, we discuss the complex relations between inequalities and educational opportunities and question the extent to which these programmes are affecting social structures in Costa Rica and Peru.

This paper is one of the first to investigate mobility in overall health using high-quality administrative data. The attractiveness of this approach lies in objective health measures and large sample sizes allowing twin analyses. I operationalize health mobility by a variety of statistics: rank-rank slopes, intergenerational correlations (IGCs) and sibling and identical twin correlations. I find rank-rank slopes and IGCs in the range 0.11-0.15 and sibling correlations in the range 0.14-0.20. Mobility in health is thus relatively high, both when compared to similar US-based studies, and when contrasted with outcomes such as educational attainment and income. Comparing sibling and identical twin correlations with parent-child associations confirms earlier findings in the literature on equality of opportunity, namely that sibling correlations capture far more variation than traditional IGCs. I conclude that 14%-38% of the variation in individual health outcomes can be attributed to family background and genes, factors which the individual cannot be held accountable for. This finding suggests that simple parent-child associations may be a poor metric for measuring health mobility., (© 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, governments all around are producing new policy provisions to mitigate the learning gap. Based on the new policy provision, universities switched to online education because social distancing was necessary to stop community transmission of the virus (Crawford et al., 2020). This study aims to explore how faculties perceive the effect of higher education policy response on Bangladeshi students. The paper identifies cost-sharing approach, disregard of policy context, encouragement of global job market competition, decentralisation of management, digitization of education, and individual responsibility as neoliberal features of emergency response. The data were critically analysed to understand the effect of neoliberal features of the emergency response on the university students of Bangladesh from the faculty perspective. The paper argues that the policy response is failing to address the learning gap of the students. Moreover, the implementation of this policy is generating more challenges for students by strengthening the root of social inequality and hindering social mobility.

Research in education has long noted teachers' role in assisting social and ideological reproduction. Separately, scholarship has also investigated the use of extra-curricular activities in equipping disadvantaged students with social and cultural capital, to embark on social mobility. Positioned at the intersection of these two apparently disparate strands, this paper presents a case in which teachers' extra-curricular work is seen to simultaneously enact subtle socio-ideological reproduction, and the facilitation of social mobility attainment. Specifically, the paper draws on a study of how teachers in a lower-status junior college in Singapore prepare their students in applying for prestigious state-sponsored scholarships. Through teachers' extra-curricular work of "allying" and "aligning," social mobility and social reproduction are simultaneously made possible, yet also exist in some tension. Thus, this paper offers a unique sociological perspective on teachers' extra-curricular work and its significance for broader issues of meritocracy, social mobility, and social reproduction.

This paper delineates the growth of academy trusts in England before exploring government intentions to base the future state-funded school system on 'strong' multi-academy trusts. Academies, directly funded by the central government, first appeared in 2002 as an alternative to local authority-managed provision, with the initial intention of addressing continued underperformance of schools in urban areas. It was not until 2010, however, with an incoming Coalition government that the academisation process was widened, a policy seemingly driven by a desire to limit the influence of local authorities in line with principles of new public management (NPM). The number of academies increased dramatically (for a variety of reasons) to the point where now over half the school population are within them. Individual academies have, since the appointment of Regional School Commissioners in 2014, been encouraged to join formally with other academies as multi-academy trusts (MATs). Whilst by 2022 there were nearly 10,000 academies, most were in MATs with the government signalling its intention through a White Paper to base the future on them. The academisation process has featured several areas of concern, however, not all of which will be resolved by the policy statements contained in this proposal for new legislation.

A systematic review of qualitative primary data (2010-2021) was undertaken to understand how inequality is experienced by undergraduate students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds transitioning to the UK labour market. A ten-step protocol for qualitative synthesis was adapted to guide the study, whilst the PRISMA flow diagram was used to report the search. Data was extracted from 14 papers with thematic synthesis used to analyse the results inductively. This review illustrates multiple barriers faced by disadvantaged socio-economic students in a competitive graduate labour market and the severe impact this may have on student career development. Disadvantaged students often apply more effort than advantaged counterparts in seeking work and internship opportunities and live more precariously, as they lack finance to buffer them. In contrast, advantaged socio-economic status students can act quickly to build their employability profiles from the beginning of their degree studies, with the strategic application of social, cultural and economic capital. The qualitative papers in this review complement previous quantitative research, illustrating that despite participation rates in high education increasing for disadvantaged students, their career outcomes have not generally improved relative to their more advantaged peers. The review includes recommendations for stakeholders including government, universities, careers services and employers.

Background: Much of the recorded medical literature focuses on individual-level factors that contribute to firearm violence. Recently, studies have highlighted higher incidence of firearm violence in historically redlined and marginalized areas, but few have gone on to study the downstream associations causing these differences. This study aims to understand the effects of historic redlining and current income mobility on firearm violence., Methods: Using a retrospective cross-sectional design, shooting incidents were spatially joined with redlining vector files and linked to income mobility data (how much a child makes in adulthood). Participants included all assault and homicide incidents involving a firearm in the city of Boston, between 2016 and 2019. The exposure of interest was redlining designation as outlined by the Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s and income mobility, stratified by race, defined as the income of a child in their 30s compared with where they grew up (census tract level). The outcome measured was shooting rate per census block., Results: We find that increases in Black income mobility (BIM) and White income mobility (WIM) are associated with significant decreases in rates of firearm incidents in all HOLC designations; however, there is a larger decrease with increasing BIM (relative risk, 0.47 per unit increase in BIM [95% confidence interval, 0.35-0.64]; relative risk, 0.81 per unit increase in WIM [95% confidence interval, 0.71-0.93]). Plotting predicted rates of firearm violence in each HOLC designation at different levels of BIM, there were no significant differences in shooting rates between historically harmful and beneficial classifications above $50,000 of BIM. Despite level of WIM, there were continued disparities between harmful and beneficial HOLC classification., Conclusion: These findings highlight the importance of structural racism in the form of redlining and discriminatory housing policies, and the preclusion from economic mobility therein, on the incidence of firearm violence today., Level of Evidence: Prognostic and Epidemiological; Level IV., (Copyright © 2022 Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. All rights reserved.)

Like many predominantly Black urban cities, Detroit, Michigan, has experienced significant out-migration among Black residents over the past 30 years. This situation has altered families' relationships to the communities and schools where they have been nurtured or call home. Therefore, this paper examines how seven Black families' place attachments influenced their geographic movement and school choices in the Detroit metropolitan region. Findings show that despite families' movement to surrounding suburbs, varied experiences in Detroit influenced families' decision-making regarding where to live, their search for sociocultural experiences that supported their families holistically, and their perceptions and navigation of municipal boundaries and borders. Families' intention toward maintaining connections with Detroit enact what I term embracing the city. Embracing the city helps consider the importance of socio-spatial ties that persist and orient Black families' community perceptions and school choices in suburban contexts.

Widening participation (WP) in Higher Education (HE) is often positioned as key to resolving social inequality; it underpins arguments that increasing levels of education lead to reduced levels of poverty. Located within the tension of duty and need, WP is positioned as both the responsibility of the University and a financial imperative. This paper considers the student experience of this tension, specifically the contradictions between discourses of equality and diversity and neoliberal conceptualisations of HE as market. Drawing upon qualitative research conducted during the closure of a WP satellite campus, the paper explores the consequences of the withdrawal of HE provision for 'local' students. Utilising focus group methodologies to develop an approach for 'thinking with' seven WP students, the paper explores the material, social and affective contexts within which students experience university in their 'hometown'. Foregrounding participants' critical understanding of their 'place' within a marketised HE sector, we consider the formation of student identity as a site of struggles for value. We argue, the closure of satellite campuses must be understood within the context of deepening social-spatial inequalities. Developing a critique of individualised constructions of 'social mobility', we outline an alternative imaginary of HE as an intergenerational community resource.

That young Canadians are obtaining more education than previous generations might suggest that the relationship between parents' education and that of their children has weakened. However, accounts of intergenerational educational mobility in Canada published in the past two decades are scant. Drawing on the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults, this paper examines trends in intergenerational educational mobility from 1969 to 2016. Adopting an educational transition approach, I find no change in the relative relationship between parents' and children's education over time despite the structural expansion of education. The results of a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition suggest the upgrading of parents' education across cohorts partially explains this stability. The analyses further reveal a bifurcation in Canada's post-secondary system whereby higher parental education provides and advantage to youth for university degree completion while those whose parents have less education make their way to other post-secondary institutions., (© 2022 Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie.)