Getting up and staying up: understanding social mobility over three-generations in Britain.

Social mobility scholars increasingly recognise that traditional two-generation models of intergenerational social mobility provide an insufficiently nuanced picture of the nature of intergenerational movement between social classes. In particular, twogeneration models, by design, make it impossible to calculate the extent of longstanding class immobility extending over multiple generations, and to establish how much of the class mobility observed between fathers and children constitutes a reversal of the mobility fortunes of fathers. Drawing on the British Cohort Study (BCS) which follows a nationally representative sample of individuals born in 1970, we show that around one third of all immobility within the salariat class (professional and managerial occupations) constitutes longstanding immobility spanning at least three generations, and that people born to salariat class fathers are much less likely to experience downward mobility if their families have been 'up' for more than one generation. We examine the potential influence on mobility chances in the third generation of socioeconomic differences between fathers who nominally share the same class position but have different intergenerational mobility histories. We find that fathers who were themselves born into the salariat rather than upwardly mobile into it tend to have higher incomes, are more likely to be homeowners, are more likely to hold a university degree and less likely to have no qualifications, are more likely to have sent their child to a private school, and are more likely to have sent their child to university. These factors partially explain the differing mobility chances of their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]