Inequalities

Tag: social mobility

  • Is there really a ‘glass floor’? Or can the children of the elite be genuinely downwardly mobile?

    In the previous post I explained why, in order to get a full picture of downward mobility in Britain, we need to consider the prestige of people’s occupations. I asked whether people who had apparently been downwardly mobile from advantaged backgrounds might, in many cases, have actually fallen sideways into highly prestigious jobs. In this…

  • The missing piece of the social mobility puzzle

    This is the first of a pair of posts about a project I’ve been working on looking at downward social mobility. In this first post I’m going to talk about why we should care about downward mobility, and what might be missing from our current understanding of it. You can find the second post here.…

  • The Boris Johnson ‘Cornflake’ model of social mobility

    The Boris Johnson ‘Cornflake’ model of social mobility

    There are some Boris Johnson news stories we can all enjoy. Like that time he fell in a river. Or when he got stuck up on a zip-wire. Or even when he rescued that woman being menaced by youths – astride his trusty bicycle, the world’s most unlikely knight errant. Then there are the less…

  • What are elite universities for?

    What are elite universities for?

    A perennial question in higher education is whether elite institutions like Oxford and Cambridge are doing enough to recruit people from outside the traditional pool of white private-school kids. Every year we have the same conversation, and reach the same conclusion: probably not. What I didn’t realise until recently was that this debate assumes something…