Does more education improve social mobility?

Does it help if societies expand their educational systems, with more students enrolling higher levels, to achieve a fairer society? Or more specifically: does more education in a society improve socioeconomic mobility from parents to children? I studied this broad question, that kept many social scientists busy for many years, using data covering birth cohorts from the 1920s till the 1970s. All these people have developed their career to an extent that we can usefully assess their socioeconomic attainment in relation to their parents.

The modernist view on educational expansion and meritocracy

This question is important because it helps us to understand whether the modernist societal model of rationalisation and meritocratization—that led to strong impetus to educational expansion—deserves the criticism it has received lately. The meritocracy—defined as a social system that determines reward on merit—has received bad press lately. Concerns like the “tyranny of merit”, as Harvard professor Michael Sandel called it, or the “meritocracy trap” in the words of Yale professor Daniel Markovits, are that the meritocracy personalises success and failure (successes and failures are attributed to the individual), it legitimises economic inequalities, and it is a “myth” because there are still structural barriers to achievement at odds with meritocratic allocation. But rather than calling the meritocracy a “deeply elitist project”, I’d say what is at stake is the increasingly non-meritocratic functioning of education. Rising tuition fees and rising school segregation, in the context of enlarged economic inequalities, make it harder for students of less resourceful families to do well in school.

Education and socioeconomic mobility

My comparison of close to 300 societal contexts—combinations of country and birth cohort from four different continents—showed that social mobility is higher if the participation in post-secondary education increases. Moreover, mobility improved by both weakening the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status indirectly through education, and directly within categories of education. In other words, not only is educational expansion related to more equal opportunities in reaching higher levels of education, but the direct transmission of socioeconomic advantage is also reduced among those who reach similar levels of education. This finding is important because a lot of sociological scholarship would argue that educational expansion induces more refined ways to transmit advantage from parents to children, e.g. by entering high-quality universities, by choosing particular graduate and post-graduate courses, by helping children through social networks, or by heightened relevance of genetic advantages in more egalitarian contexts. Our results are at odds with this claim. The refined ways to transmit advantage—even if they are real and create inequalities—are not able to counter the equalising role of rising access to post-secondary education.

This is an important finding because a recurrent debate in the sociology of social stratification and mobility concerns the existence of contextual differences among high-income countries. On the one hand, some stratification scholars hold that social mobility patterns are highly similar across such countries, and have changed only little. On the other hand, other scholars question such similarities by showing that institutional context matters for patterns of stratification and mobility. Also in my mobility study I examined the role of educational policies. It appears that raising the minimum school leaving age has the consequence of improving educational opportunities and thereby reducing the intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic status.

More expansion is needed

What do these findings tell us about the potential of the meritocracy? Without ignoring the potentially damaging psychological consequences of the personalisation of success and failure, the gains from enhancing access to advanced levels of education are tremendous. Educational expansion has come to a halt in many societies, and one may easily think that further expansion of post-secondary education is impossible. However, just like economics Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin and Laurence Katz have argued with regard to egalitarian income distributions, it is clear that further equalisation of access to post-secondary education will translate in more social mobility. If we think of the American ‘high school movement’ of a century ago, that propagated access to high school for all, it is likely that contemporary pundits also had reservations against such an ambitious goal. Let’s not fool ourselves with a lack of ambition, because it will harm other people’s kids. Post-secondary education, in the form of vocational qualifications, bachelor’s degrees, or post-graduate education, can, at least when we can ensure high quality instruction, promote social mobility, civic engagement, and climate change awareness.

Also today’s societies would benefit greatly from expanding opportunities, even if trends seem to go in the opposite direction. Only if we let everybody take part in further societal progression can we sustain an inclusive, harmonious, and prosperous society.

Tags: Social Mobility, Education