Is Postgraduate Study the New Frontier of Social Mobility?

• In Event: 555 - Section on Sociology of Education Paper Session. Educational Gradients in Adult Attainments

Abstract

This paper investigate the relationship between social origin, graduate-level degree attainment, and occupational outcomes across five age-group cohorts in the UK. It uses recently-available data from the UK Labour Force Survey to conduct a series of logistic regressions of post-graduate (MA or higher) degree attainment among those with first degrees (BAs), with controls for measures of degree classification (similar to GPA), degree subject (major), along with age, gender, ethnicity and national origin. It shows a marked strengthening of the effect of class origin on degree- and occupational attainment across age cohorts: While for older generations there is little or no difference by class origin in the rates at which people with BAs attain postgraduate degrees, working-class-origin people in the youngest age-group in our study are only about 28% as likely to have an advanced degree when compared with otherwise-similar people from privileged origins. Moreover, social origin matters more for occupational destination, even among those with post-graduate degrees, for those in younger age groups. These findings demonstrate the newly important, and increasing, role of *post-graduate* degrees in reproducing economic inequality in the wake of the substantial expansion of undergraduate and post-graduate education (and support the Maximally Maintained Inequality/MMI thesis).

Authors

• Daniel Laurison, Swarthmore College

• Paul Brian James Wakeling, University of Manchester, UK