Search

We aim to bring together two current strands of research into inequalities in individuals' educational attainment that are associated with their social origins: that concerned with the "primary" and "secondary" effects of social origins in creating inequalities, and that concerned with the relation between these inequalities and different components of social origins, taken to represent different forms of parental resources. Our main findings are the following. The secondary effects of social origins—their effects via the educational choices that young people make given their prior academic performance—are clearly operative across five key educational transitions within the English educational system. More specifically, we estimate that 35% of the total effect of social origins is secondary in the earliest transition that we consider, and from 15% to 20% in the subsequent four. Furthermore, mediation analyses reveal that secondary effects are most strongly associated with parental education and then, to a lesser degree with parental status, while little association exists with parental class and none at all with parental income. Primary effects are also at all transitions most strongly associated with parental education and status but in this case both parental class and parental income do retain some importance. We suggest an explanation for our empirical findings as resulting largely from the concern of highly educated, professional parents, and their children to avoid the occurrence of downward intergenerational mobility, especially in terms of education and status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Cognitive ability mediates under 50% of the effect of social origins on education. • There has been no sustained increase or decrease in this figure over recent decades. • The mediating role of cognitive ability changes little across the educational career. • These findings hold regardless of how we measure social origins. • Such inequalities are not primarily due to differences in cognitive ability. Abstract In this paper, we address two research questions on the basis of the series of British birth cohort studies. First, how large is the part played by cognitive ability in mediating the association that exists between individuals' educational attainment and their social origins, and is there evidence of any change in the importance of its mediating role over recent decades? Second, does the importance of its mediating role change over the course of individuals' educational careers? As regards the first question, we find that only around half of the effects of individuals' social origins on their educational attainment is mediated via their cognitive ability, as measured in early life. There has been some fluctuation in the mediation percentage over time, but no sustained increase. Moreover, this is the case in whatever way we measure social origins. As regards the second question, we find that the mediating role of cognitive ability changes little in importance as individuals' educational careers progress, with the possible exception that it declines in the case of an educational threshold relating to upper secondary qualifications. In the light of our results, we call into question the idea that the intergenerational reproduction of educational inequalities is driven overwhelmingly via the intergeneration transmission of cognitive ability; and also claims such as those made by Marks (2014) of 'the decline of the social' in the determination of the educational attainment of children from more or less advantaged families. While the relative importance of different forms of parental resources for children's educational success may be changing somewhat, our findings indicate a strong 'persistence of the social'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years much research has been concerned with the patterns of association that exist between individuals’ class origins, their educational attainment, and their eventual class destinations – the ‘OED triangle’. In particular, interest has focused on the possible role of educational expansion and reform in weakening the net association between class origins and destinations or, that is, increasing social fluidity, and thus countering other tendencies, such as increasing inequalities of condition, likely to reduce fluidity. In this paper we examine trends in the OED triangle in Britain on the basis of data from three successive birth cohort studies. We advance on previous research in measuring individuals’ educational attainment not only in absolute but also in relative terms – i.e. in this latter respect treating education as a ‘positional’ good. We show that measuring education in these two different ways leads to significantly differing results. In general, when education is measured in relative terms, associations within the OED triangle show a greater stability over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divergent findings on trends in inequalities in educational attainment associated with individuals’ social origins have led to much discussion of how far these reflect real differences by place and time or, rather, differences in research procedures. But in this latter regard, one issue has received relatively little attention: i.e. that of the conceptualization and measurement of social origins. We propose decomposing social origins into parental class, parental status, and parental education. Following this approach, we analyse data from three British birth cohort studies. We show that these three components of social origins have independent and distinctive effects on educational attainment, and ones that persist or change in differing ways across the cohorts. We also make some assessment of their combined effects. We consider the methodological implications of our findings, in particular for analyses of trends in educational inequalities, and, further, how they might result from other, independently established, changes in social stratification in Britain over the historical period covered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social mobility has become a topic of central political concern. In political and also media circles it is widely believed that in Britain today mobility is in decline. However, this belief appears to be based on a single piece of research by economists that is in fact concerned with intergenerational income mobility: specifically, with the relation between family income and children's later earnings. Research by sociologists using the same data sources – the British birth cohort studies of 1958 and 1970 – but focusing on intergenerational class mobility does not reveal a decline either in total mobility rates or in underlying relative rates. The paper investigates these divergent findings. We show that they do not result from the use of different subsets of the data or of different analytical techniques. Instead, given the more stable and generally less fluid class mobility regime, it is the high level of income mobility of the 1958 cohort, rather than the lower level of the 1970 cohort, that is chiefly in need of explanation. Further analyses – including ones of the relative influence of parental class and of family income on children's educational attainment – suggest that the economists' finding of declining mobility between the two cohorts may stem, in part at least, from the fact that the family income variable for the 1958 cohort provides a less adequate measure of ‘permanent income’ than does that for the 1970 cohort. But, in any event, it would appear that the class mobility regime more fully captures the continuity in economic advantage and disadvantage that persists across generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In class analysis the main regularities that have been established by empirical research are not ones of long-term class formation or decomposition, as envisaged in Marxist or liberal theory, but rather ones that exhibit the powerful resistance to change of class relations and associated life-chances and patterns of social action. If these regularities are to be explained, theory needs to be correspondingly reoriented, and must abandon functionalist and teleological assumptions in favour of providing more secure micro-foundations. This argument is developed and illustrated in the course of an attempt to apply rational action theory to the explanation of persisting class differentials in educational attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]