Education and Mobility

Most writing on the relationship between education and mobility has accorded primacy to the former in a double sense. On the one hand, education comes chronologically before occupation and is seen as a precondition for mobility. On the other hand, if qualifications are seen as the ticket that allows entry to desirable jobs, and education is placed at the heart of the process of individual achievement (said to be increasingly replacing a system based on ascription), then education becomes the most important variable in the explanation of mobility patterns. Variations on this theme are considerable. Examples can be found in the recent (and earlier) work of Halsey (1980), which regards the operation of the school system to be central; in that of Blau and Duncan (1967) which treats qualifications as one variable in a set which enables the sociologist to model the mobility process by means of path analysis; and in Parkin or Giddens’ view of credentialism as a closure mechanism employed by the professional/managerial class. These (and many other accounts) all share what is an intuitively attractive starting point, namely that education is increasingly necessary to achieve mobility or to maintain social advantage. In the debate about British mobility this is referred to, as one writer has put it, as ‘the familiar hypothesis that “tightening links” between education and economy reduce the degree of occupational inheritance’ (Ridge, 1974, p. 27). The thesis of the ‘tightening bond’ can be traced to a T. H. Marshall lecture which was first given in 1949 and published in 1950 (see Marshall, 1965).