Social and ethnic inequalities in intergenerational social mobility: the role of the educational macro context

Research description

Over the past decades, economic and social inequalities are widening across the Western world. Simultaneously, mass-education transformed societies in “schooled societies”, where educational systems became central institutions with a primary role in cultural beliefs, social stratification and mobility. However, comparative research into intergenerational social mobility has been restricted to an assessment of the impact of education on an individual level. This falls short because education has gradually grown into a central institution. I will assess education on a macrolevel: are opportunities for climbing the social ladder more equal in societies with an influential educational system? I will assess the correlation between the rate of schooled society and social mobility across 30 European countries, using five waves of the European Social Survey, one of the European Value Survey and two of the International Social Survey Programme. Next, I will also examine social mobility of a group that is particularly disadvantaged at school: ethnic minorities. This study will be the first to describe their intergenerational social mobility patterns in Europe, based on the same data. Finally, I will contribute to the debate on the conceptualisation of class. Decades of mass education gives rise to doubt the capacity of paradigmatically applied EGP class schemes to capture class divides. We verify the suitability of EGP class schemes by contrasting with an alternative class 
scheme.