The study presents empirical evidence on the existing socioeconomic ceiling in employability and higher education, particularly for the lower socioeconomic group.South Korea has experienced a severely stratified higher education system and the layers of employment. In the study, we examined if parental education and income levels are associated with the perceived employability of college students in accordance with the theories of a class ceiling (Friedman, S. & Laurison, D., 2015) and concerted cultivation (Lareau, A., 2011). The research outcomes revealed there exist educational and social inequalities that an individual can hardly overcome solely with his/her efforts. Although students from the lower socioeconomic group may secure admission into colleges in South Korea, this does not necessarily mean that all students have equal opportunities to build necessary skills for employment.The results are significant in that they have shown the differences in acquiring information and skills significantly stem from parental socioeconomic status, and the students' socioeconomic factors affect not only their academic achievements but also the perception of employability.
Though various measures of mobility rate for colleges, e.g., bottom-to-top mobility rate, status maintenance rate, and middle-class mobility rate, have been introduced, they have rarely been reviewed together to see the whole picture of intergenerational mobility, particularly in non-Western societies. This paper fills this gap and characterises mobility rates for 17 different college tiers in South Korea using the Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey for 37,552 graduates from 2007 to 2010. It documents two main results. First, mobility rates are higher for males than for females in all three measures, indicating colleges in South Korea are less effective as a social ladder for females. Second, many selective colleges are more likely to play a role as a glass floor than a social ladder due to their lower low-income access, and 'selective public' colleges are the engines of upward social mobility for students from the bottom three quintiles. Though people believe education is the single greatest hope to achieve upward social mobility, these findings cast doubt on the idea that college attendance alone can promote social mobility. This paper does not necessarily identify causal relationships that can be manipulated to improve mobility rates; however, it documents various patterns of interest to policymakers.
The socioeconomic gap in participation at university is an enduring policy issue in South Korea, as in many other countries. However, less attention has been paid to the socioeconomic gap in the outcomes from tertiary education. This paper addresses this gap in the literature, using the Korean Education and Employment Panel (KEEP) data to investigate the extent to which the wages of Korean graduates who attended similar higher education institutions vary by socioeconomic background. The results show that a degree appears to largely level the playing field, in terms of earnings, between male graduates from poor and rich backgrounds. For females, by contrast, family background is still a strong predictor of earnings, even after allowing for institution attended and discipline of degree. Further, the wage premium for 2-year and 4-year college degrees also varies by family background. Four-year college degrees, contrary to popular belief, do not always attract a higher wage premium than 2-year college degrees, particularly for men from poorer family backgrounds.
This paper examines if universities in the UK mediate the impacts of spatial inequalities on earnings disparities among similar graduates and provides new evidence on the persistent income inequality at the neighbourhood level, using the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey data on the population of individuals graduating from universities in 2012/13. The results suggest that graduates from neighbourhoods with the highest university participation rate, on average, have higher earnings than those from the lowest-participation neighbourhoods, holding demographic features and university-related factors constant. The earnings gap by the neighbourhood quality remains substantial so that males with a degree from the Russell Group from the lowest-participation neighbourhoods barely earn higher incomes than their counterparts from the highest-participation areas who attended a less prestigious university. These results imply that universities in the UK do not fully level the playing field in terms of earnings disparities among graduates from different neighbourhoods.
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