We use the Great British Class Survey to examine the association between social background, university attended and social position for over 85,000 graduates. This unique dataset allows us to look beyond the very early labour market experiences of graduates investigated in previous studies and to examine the outcome of attending particular institutions. We find strong evidence of distinct stratification of outcomes by university attended, even within the prestigious Russell Group. There are marked differences in entry to elite positions for graduates of different universities, with sharp gradients in levels of economic capital in particular. The 'golden triangle' of Oxford, Cambridge and certain London institutions emerges as a distinct elite. However, even within that grouping there are striking differences, with Oxford ahead of Cambridge on several measures. These findings underline the importance of a geographically concentrated set of elite universities in channelling access to top positions in British society.Over recent decades, there has been increasing academic and policy interest in the impact of higher education on social mobility and entry to elite occupations. These concerns are fuelled by the marketization of the higher education sector and recognition that its dramatic expansion requires a more fine-grained analysis, distinguishing between the fortunes of graduates from different universities. Although the proliferation of league tables has generated strong recognition of pecking orders, status and funding hierarchies, these have rarely been linked to systematic social scientific studies of social reproduction or elite recruitment. We address this deficiency by using the BBC's Great British Class Survey (GBCS). This provides a uniquely granular account of attendance at specific universities, and studying specific subjects, in facilitating access to socially advantaged positions, situating this analysis in the context of other contributory factors.

No abstract

The research impact agenda is frequently portrayed through 'crisis' accounts whereby academic identity is at risk of a kind of existential unravelling. Amid reports of academics under siege in an environment in which self-sovereignty is traditionally preferred and regulation is resisted, heightened emotionalism, namely fear and dread dominate the discourse. Such accounts belie the complexity of the varying moral dispositions, experiences and attitudes possessed by different individuals and groups in the academic research community. In this article we attempt to examine the role of the affective in response to a particular research policy directive -the impact agenda. In doing so, we reveal the contributing factors affecting the community's reaction to impact. In cases where personal, moral and disciplinary identities align with the impact agenda, the emotional response is positive and productive. For many academics however, misalignment gives rise to emotional dissonance. We argue that when harnessed, further acknowledgement of the role of emotion in the academy can produce a more socially and morally coherent response to an impact agenda. We review academic responses from the UK and Australia (n=51) and observe a community heavily emotionally invested in what they do, such that threats to academic identity and research are consequently threats to the self.

We investigate the relationship between social origin, postgraduate degree attainment, and occupational outcomes across five British age-group cohorts. We use recently-available UK Labour Force Survey data to conduct a series of logistic regressions of postgraduate (masters or doctorate) degree attainment among those with first degrees, with controls for measures of degree classification, degree subject, age, gender, ethnicity and national origin. We find 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 first-degree graduates attain postgraduate degrees, those with working-class-origins in the youngest age-group are only about 28 per cent as likely to obtain a postgraduate degree when compared with their peers from privileged origins. Moreover, social origin matters more for occupational destination, even among those with postgraduate degrees, for those in younger age groups. These findings demonstrate the newly important, and increasing, role of postgraduate degrees in reproducing socio-economic inequality in the wake of the substantial expansion of undergraduate and postgraduate education. Our findings lend some support to the Maximally Maintained Inequality thesis, suggesting that gains in equality of access to first-degrees are indeed at risk from postgraduate expansion.

In Britain and elsewhere, the influence of family socioeconomic status (SES) on education is already evident in primary school, and it persists and increases throughout the school years, with children from impoverished families earning lower grades and obtaining fewer educational qualifications than children from more privileged backgrounds. Reducing the effect of family background on children’s education is a pivotal aim of educators, policymakers, and researchers, but the success of their efforts is poorly evidenced to date. Here, we show for the first time that over 95 years in Britain the association between family SES and children’s primary school performance has remained stable. Across 16 British population cohorts born between 1921 and 2011 (N = 91,935), we confirmed previous findings of a correlation between family SES and children’s school performance of 0.28 [95% Confidence Interval 0.22–0.34], after adjusting for cohort-specific confounders. Contrary to the popular assumption that family background inequality has increased over time, we observed only minimal differences in the association between family SES and school performance across British cohorts. We argue that education policies must prioritize equity in learning outcomes over equality in learning opportunities, if they seek to disrupt the perpetuation of social and economic inequality across generations. We speculate that the influence of family SES on children’s education will only noticeably weaken if primary education settings become better equipped to meet and remediate the children’s differential learning needs.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence Newcastle University ePrints -eprint.ncl.ac.uk

Despite recent rapid increases in postgraduate numbers, little is known about the ethnic background of current postgraduates. This lacuna is addressed using data about the UK postgraduate population. Overall, students from minority ethnic backgrounds are under-represented among research and teacher-training students but not on masters degrees. The trend over time is encouraging. Substantial differences between minority ethnic groups are found and patterns of participation are shown to be structured by subject of study, institutional location and prior attainment. It is argued that differences in representation must be understood in the context of existing knowledge about prior educational patterns and subsequent labour market outcomes.Viewed in this way, underrepresentation of certain minority groups is potential evidence of disadvantage but underrepresentation can be interpreted more positively for other groups. Concerns remain over minorities' access to research degrees and the implications of this for the demographic composition of the academic profession.

A worldwide trend towards high levels of participation in higher education, paired with concerns about the post-university destinations of an increasing pool of graduates, have brought about two parallel phenomena: a process of sharp stratification in higher education and the growing relevance of postgraduate education as undergraduate study becomes nearly ubiquitous, particularly among the most advantaged groups of students. To date, the literature on socioeconomic inequalities and access to higher education has focussed on undergraduate education, with some researchers specifically investigating access to the most prestigious institutions. We contribute to this body of research by investigating the effects of socioeconomic characteristics on access to postgraduate education at those universities believed to deliver elite forms of higher education. We look at access to ‘elite’ postgraduate education among English graduates, operationalised as belonging to the Russell Group of research-intensive universities. We analyse an exceptionally large dataset (N = 533,885) capturing graduate destinations, including postgraduate education at specific institutions. We find that socioeconomic inequalities in attending an elite postgraduate degree persist, but these are mediated by educational variables. Socioeconomically advantaged students are more likely to attain a good degree and to attend an elite institution at the undergraduate level, which powerfully predicts access to elite postgraduate education.