Structural Change Shapes Career Mobility Opportunities: An Analysis of Cohorts, Gender and Parental Class

Research suggests that structural change drives occupational mobility in high-income countries over time, but two partially competing theories explain how such change occurs. One suggests that younger cohorts replace older ones through higher education, and the second suggests that individuals adapt to structural change by switching from declining to new or growing occupations during their careers. A proposed occupational scheme aligns with the two dimensions of structural change – skill upgrading on the vertical axis of occupational differentiation, increasing demand for data comprehension (i.e. high skill) and primary tasks concerning either people or things on the horizontal axis. Applied to career trajectories in the Swedish labour market, sequence analyses of the scheme suggest stability in attainment of career mobility types over time between consecutive birth cohorts, and considerable evidence for within-career manoeuvring. Analyses address heterogeneity along parental class and gender.

The role of partnering and assortative mating for income inequality: The case of Finland, 1991–2014

Previous studies covering various developed countries suggest that changes in assortative mating by education have contributed only a little to the changes in income inequality, opposite to the expectations of many. In this paper we consider two potential reasons for the zero effects: (a) that it is the selection into partnership rather than assortative mating according to specific characteristics that matters; and (b) that for assortative mating to matter, a broader spectrum of matching characteristics than just education should be considered, such as matching by employment and social origin. We study these assumptions using register data on household income inequalities, education, employment and parental class background in Finland 1991–2014. We analyze men and women separately and focus on individuals aged 35–40. We concentrate on between-group income inequality as measured by the Theil index. The results suggest that partnership is an important factor behind income inequality, and changes in selection into partnership can explain a substantial part of the changes in income inequality. Assortative mating does not matter as much, even if more sorting characteristics are taken into account. Social origin contributes very little to the income inequality of families in Finland

Tracking in Israeli high schools: social inequality after 50 years of educational reforms

This paper provides an overview of tracking in Israeli upper secondary education and assesses its effect on the attainment of higher education degrees and earnings. Since the early 1970’s, the Israeli education system has gone through three major reforms that profoundly transformed tracking and sorting mechanisms in secondary education. All three aimed at reducing social inequality in educational attainment through structural changes that expanded learning opportunities and replaced rigid top-down sorting mechanisms with concepts of differentiation and choice. Utilising a data set that includes a large representative sample of Israelis born between 1978 and 1981 who were fully affected by the reforms, the analysis shows that there is a clear link between social background and track placement. Track placement, in turn, is associated with attainment of higher education degrees and income. Moreover, tracking mediates a large proportion of the association between parental class and these two adult outcomes. We also show that the low-status academic tracks that replaced the vocational tracks did not improve the life chances of low-achieving students from disadvantaged social groups.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>We analyze the relation between social background, secondary education tracking and later life achievements using registry data.</li><br /><li>The results show that tracking mediates a large proportion of the association between background and outcomes High-tier vocational tracks improved the chances of students.</li><br /><li>Low-status academic tracks did not improve the life chances of low background students.</li></ul>

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EFFECTS OF SOCIAL ORIGINS ON EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT: NEW FINDINGS FOR ENGLAND

We aim to bring together two strands of existing research into inequalities in individuals’ educational attainment associated with their social origins: that into the relative importance of the primary and secondary effects of social origins; and that into the relative importance of different components of social origins, indicative of different kinds 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 we consider, and from 15-20% in the subsequent four. Further, 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. Finally, secondary effects on educational transitions appear to be top-driven. There is a clear tendency for their importance to be greater in the case of young people with highly educated, professional parents as compared with those of all other social backgrounds. We suggest an explanation for our empirical findings as resulting largely from the concern of such parents and their children to avoid the occurrence of downward intergenerational mobility, especially in terms of education and status.

Measuring social origins and educational attainment in the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE), [Waves 1–8]

This Data Note has been prepared for the research project ‘Primary and Secondary Effects of Social Origins on Educational Attainment: A New Approach’, conducted at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford. The purpose of this project is to examine how different components of social origins affect people’s educational achievement and attainment. To achieve this aim, we use data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) and the National Pupil Database (NPD). This document describes the construction of key variables that have been be used in the project. Specifically, it provides information on the focal independent variables – parental class, status, education and income – as recorded in the LSYPE survey, as well as the dependent variable(s) of educational achievement and attainment, as recorded in the National Pupil Database (NPD) and the latest available wave of the LSYPE survey.

The role of partnering and assortative mating by social origin for income inequality: The case of Finland, 1991–2014

Previous studies covering various developed countries suggest that changes in assortative mating by education have contributed only a little to the changes in income inequality, opposite to the expectations of many. In this paper we consider two potential reasons for the zero effects: a) that it is the selection into partnerships rather than assortative mating according to specific characteristics that matters; and b) that for assortative mating to matter, a broader spectrum of matching characteristics than just education should be considered, such as matching by employment and social origin. We study these assumptions using register data on household income inequalities, education, employment and parental class background in Finland 1991–2014. We analyze men and women separately and focus on individuals aged 35–40. We concentrate on between group income inequality as measured by the Theil index. The results suggest that selection into partnership is an important factor behind income inequality and can explain most of the changes in income inequality. Assortative mating does not matter much, even if more sorting characteristics are taken into account. All in all, social origin contributes very little to the income inequality of families in Finland.

Mapping inequalities in school attendance: the relationship between different dimensions of socioeconomic status and forms of school absence

In this paper, we investigated whether and to what extent dimensions of socioeconomic background (parental education, parental class, free school meal registration, housing status, and neighborhood deprivation) predict overall school absences and different reasons for missing school (truancy, sickness, family holidays and temporary exclusion) among 4,620 secondary pupils in Scotland. Participants were drawn from a sample of the Scottish Longitudinal Study comprising linked Census data and administrative school records. Using fractional logit models and logistic regressions, we found that all dimensions of socioeconomic background were uniquely linked to overall absences. Multiple measures of socioeconomic background were also associated with truancy, sickness-related absence and temporary exclusion. Social housing and parental education had the most pervasive effect across these forms of absenteeism.

Understanding the Social Mobility Chances of Children from Working- Class Backgrounds in Britain: How Important are Cognitive Ability and Locus of Control?

Research in social stratification has shown that children from working-class backgrounds tend to obtain substantially lower levels of educational attainment and lower labour market positions than children from higher social class backgrounds. However, we still know relatively little about the micro-level processes that account for this empirical regularity. Our study examines the roles of two individual-level characteristics—cognitive ability and locus of control—in mediating the effect of individuals’ parental class background on their educational attainment and social class position in Britain. We find that cognitive ability mediates only about 35 per cent of the total parental class effect on educational attainment and only about 20 per cent of the total parental class effect on respondents’ social class position, net of their educational attainment. These findings contradict existing claims that differences in the life chances of children from different social class backgrounds are largely due to differences in cognitive ability. Moreover, we find that although individuals’ locus of control plays some role in mediating the parental class effect, its role is substantially smaller than the mediating role of cognitive ability. We measure individuals’ social class positions at different points in their careers—at labour market entry and at occupational maturity—and find that the mediating roles of cognitive ability and locus of control are remarkably stable across individuals’ working lives.

Does Downward Social Mobility Make People More Hostile Towards Immigrants?

This study explores the relationships between intergenerational social class mobility and attitudes towards immigration. We interpret a failure to keep up with parental social class (i.e. downward mobility) as an indicator that individual’s status achievements lag behind expectations and contribute to subjective feelings of loss and decline. An innovative feature of this paper is that we investigate both whether individual’s mobility experience -- micro level -- and also whether opportunity structures -- mobility on a macro level -- are linked with attitudes towards immigration. In contexts with high downward-mobility, opportunities for moving up are limited and hence perceived economic decline and loss might lead to more hostility towards immigrants. By contrast, high upward mobility expands opportunities for all and as such might promote positive attitudes towards immigrants. We use the European Social Survey data (2002-10) and conduct analyses on 30 countries using diagonal reference models that allow the effects of individual mobility trajectory to be disentangled from origin status and destination status. Our results show that the working classes hold stronger anti-immigration attitudes and parental class continues to exert an effect on attitudes in adulthood even after accounting for individual’s own social class position. Being downwardly mobile from parental class does not appear to be associated with more hostility towards immigrants, except in a few European countries like Italy, Poland, and Greece. Our random-effects meta-regression models show, however, that people living in contexts of high downward mobility are more hostile towards immigrants compared to people in contexts with high upward mobility.