Social Mobility and Disability: The Influence of Family Background and Geographical Context on Educational Attainment

Author(s):  
Jon Erik Finnvold
2021 ◽  
pp. 85-106
Author(s):  
Yun Young Kim ◽  
Young Jun Choi

This chapter aims to explore the role of education and social investment, with special attention on the effects of shadow education on social mobility in Korea. It analyses how family background and shadow education influence educational attainment and, subsequently, how educational attainment affects incomes, using data from the Korea Education and Employment Panel (KEEP). Since this 'broken social elevator' is not a problem faced only by Korea — most OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries have 'sticky ceilings' and 'sticky floors' — the chapter then discusses the direction social investment policies should take to reboot social mobility. It argues that in order to minimise the effects of family background on educational attainment and labour market outcomes, social investment policies should actively play a redistributive role.


2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (4pt1) ◽  
pp. 1217-1236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Hélène Véronneau ◽  
Lisa A. Serbin ◽  
Dale M. Stack ◽  
Jane Ledingham ◽  
Alex E. Schwartzman

AbstractSocioeconomic status (SES) is relatively stable across generations, but social policies may create opportunities for upward social mobility among disadvantaged populations during periods of economic growth. With respect to expanded educational opportunities that occurred in Québec (Canada) during the 1960s, we hypothesized that children's social and academic competence would promote upward mobility, whereas aggression and social withdrawal would have the opposite effect. Out of 4,109 children attending low-SES schools in 1976–1978, a representative subsample of 503 participants were followed until midadulthood. Path analyses revealed that parents’ SES predicted offspring's SES through associations with offspring's likeability, academic competence, and educational attainment. Interaction effects revealed individual risk factors that moderated children's ability to take advantage of intrafamilial or extrafamilial opportunities that could enhance their educational attainment. Highly aggressive participants and those presenting low academic achievement were unable to gain advantage from having highly educated parents. They reached lower educational attainment than their less aggressive or higher achieving peers who came from a similarly advantaged family background. Growing up with parents occupying low-prestige jobs put withdrawn boys and outgoing girls at risk for low educational attainment. In conclusion, social policies can raise SES across generations, with great benefits for the most disadvantaged segments of the population. However, children presenting with emerging psychopathology or academic weaknesses do not benefit from these policies as much as others, and should receive additional, targeted services.


2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga V. Sorokina

Abstract While the large disparities in educational attainment by socioeconomic status in the United States point towards the importance of credit constraints, there is no consensus in the economic literature regarding their pervasiveness. To evaluate how subjective information can enhance our understanding of the role of credit constraints in education, I focus on NLSY79 respondents' assessments of financial obstacles to schooling. About 12 percent of young adults in the data expect to underinvest in education because of financial reasons or the need to work. Using this information in a regression model of educational attainment shows that it provides valuable behavioral insights, above and beyond standard measures of income and family background.


Author(s):  
Peter Marks

Alwyn Turner’s compendious study, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (2013), ends after 574 richly observed pages seemingly contradicting its title. Turner writes of John Major and Tony Blair, that ‘both had sought to create a classless society, both had failed, with wealth inequality increasing and social mobility decreasing, and both found themselves ill at ease with the kind of classless culture that emerged instead’ (574). Turner adds that Major and Blair (and before them, Margaret Thatcher) had aimed to refashion Britain as a meritocracy, where ability was more pertinent and consequential than family background and traditional networks of social power.


Author(s):  
Maria da Conceição Rego ◽  
Carlos Vieira ◽  
Isabel Vieira

Education is generally considered a valuable tool to improve individual socio-economic status. In European peripheral countries, up to the late 1970s, only a small elite had access to higher education and such privilege guaranteed a comfortable socio-economic position, not only via the job market, but also by allowing the sustainability of pre-existing social links. From then on, democratization of access to higher education should have prompted a decrease in social and economic inequalities within and across countries. However, current data still reflects that, despite gained access to social uplifting tools, individuals from less favored backgrounds appear to not have been able to close the various gaps separating them from the more privileged ones. In this chapter, the authors analyze recent data to characterize higher education attendance in Portugal, highlighting some factors that may still block the socio-economic improvement of the less favored students and suggesting policy measures to overcome them.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janmaat

This paper explores how generalized trust develops over the life course among young people in England and whether trust is influenced more by family background factors or by conditions in late adolescence and early adulthood. If the latter are important, there may be reason for concern about falling levels of trust as material conditions, particularly regarding housing, have deteriorated for the present generation of young people. The first set of influences are highlighted by a perspective arguing that trust is primarily shaped by conditions in early childhood, while the latter are suggested by the so-called social learning perspective, which claims that people continuously adjust their social trust through interactions with people in different contexts. Analyzing data of the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Survey, the study finds that trust remains quite volatile until the early twenties. It declines between ages 16 and 23 and groups differing in educational attainment, civic participation and housing situation start to drift apart in their levels of trust between these ages. Educational attainment, civic participation and housing, as conditions pertaining to late adolescence and early adulthood, also turn out to have a significant impact on trust at age 23 controlling for trust at age 16. However, while the first two conditions are influenced by trust at age 16, housing (tenure) is not, indicating it is a more exogenous factor. Family background factors are not influential. Not only do these findings support the social learning perspective, they also suggest that poor living conditions depress trust among a significant minority of young people and exacerbate disparities of trust.


2009 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Beller

Conventional social mobility research, which measures family social class background relative to only fathers' characteristics, presents an outmoded picture of families—a picture wherein mothers' economic participation is neither common nor important. This article demonstrates that such measurement is theoretically and empirically untenable. Models that incorporate both mothers' and fathers' characteristics into class origin measures fit observed mobility patterns better than do conventional models, and for both men and women. Furthermore, in contrast to the current consensus that conventional measurement strategies do not alter substantive research conclusions, analyses of cohort change in social mobility illustrate the distortions that conventional practice can produce in stratification research findings. By failing to measure the impact of mothers' class, the current practice misses a recent upturn in the importance of family background for class outcomes among men in the United States. The conventional approach suggests no change between cohorts, but updated analyses reveal that inequality of opportunity increased significantly for men born since the mid-1960s compared with those born earlier in the century.


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