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How social mobility in HE can reproduce inequality – and what to do about it

by Anna Mountford-Zimdars, Louise Ashley, Eve Worth, and Chris Playford

Higher education has become the go-to solution for social inequality over the past three decades. Widening access and enhancing graduate outcomes have been presented as ways to generate upward mobility and ensure fairer life chances for people from all backgrounds. But what if the very ecosystem designed to level the playing field also inadvertently helps sustain the very inequalities we are hoping to overcome? 

Social mobility agendas appear progressive but are often regressive in practice. By focusing on the movement of individuals rather than structural change, they leave wealth and income disparities intact. A few people may rise, but the wider system remains unfair – but now dressed up with a meritocratic veneer. We explore these issues in our new article in the British Journal of Sociology, ‘Ambivalent Agents: The Social Mobility Industry and Civil Society under Neoliberalism in England’. We examined the role of the UK’s ‘social mobility industry’: charities, foundations, and third-sector organisations primarily working with universities to identify ‘talented’ young people from less advantaged backgrounds and help them access higher education or elite careers. We were curious – are these organisations transforming opportunity structures and delivering genuine change, or do they help stabilise the present system? 

The answer to this question is of course complex but, in essence, we found the latter. Our analysis of 150 national organisations working in higher education since the early 1990s found that organisations tend to reflect the individualistic approach outlined above and blend critical rhetoric about inequality with delivery models that are funder-compatible, metric-led and institutionally convenient. Thus – and we expect unintentionally on part of the organisations – they often perform inclusion of ‘talent’ without asking too many uncomfortable structural questions about the persistence and reproduction of unequal opportunities. 

We classified organisations in a five-part typology. Most organisations fell into the category of Pragmatic Progressives: committed to fairness but shaped by funder priorities, accountability metrics, and institutional convenience. A smaller group acted as Structural Resistors, pushing for systemic change. Others were System Conformers, largely reproducing official rhetoric. The Technocratic deliverers were most closely integrated with the state, often functioning as contracted agents with managerial, metrics-focused delivery models.   Finally, Professionalised Reformers seek reform through evidence-based programmes and advocacy, often with a focus on elite education and professions.

This finding matters beyond higher education. Civil society – the world of charities, voluntary groups, and associations – has long been seen as the sphere where resistance to inequality might flourish. Yet our findings show that many organisations are constrained or co-opted into protecting the status quo by limited budgets, demanding funders, and constant requirements to demonstrate ‘impact’. Our point is not to disparage gains or to criticise the intentions of the charity sector but to push for honest and genuine change. 

Labour’s new Civil Society Covenant, which promises to strengthen voluntary organisations and reduce short-termism, could create opportunities. But outsourcing responsibility for social goods to arm’s-length actors also risks producing symbolic reforms that celebrate individual success stories without changing the odds for the many. If higher education is to deliver genuine fairness, we must distinguish between performing fairness for a few and redistributing opportunities for the many. We thus want to conclude by suggesting three practical actions for universities, access and participation teams, and regulators such as the Office for Students.

  • Audit for Ambivalence 

    Using our typology, do you find you are working with a mix of organisations, or mainly those focused on individuals? (Please contact us for accessing our coding framework to support your institutional or regional audits.) 

    • Rebalance activity towards structural levers

    Continue high-quality outreach, but, where possible, shift resources towards systemic interventions such as contextual admissions with meaningful grade floors, strong maintenance support, foundation pathways with guaranteed progression and fair, embedded work placements 

    • Redesign accountability

    Ask the regulator to measure structural outcomes as well as individual ones, at sector and regional levels. When commissioning work, ask for participatory governance and community accountability and measure that too.

    We believe civil-society partnerships can play a vital role – but not if they become the sole heavy-lifter or metric of success. Universities are well positioned to embrace structural levers, protect space for critique, and hold themselves accountable for distributional outcomes. If this happens, the crowded charity space around social mobility could become a vibrant counter-movement for genuine change to opportunities and producing fairness rather than a prop for maintaining an unequal status quo. 

    In terms of research, our next step is speaking directly to people working in the ‘social mobility industry.’ Do they/you recognise the tensions we highlight? How do they navigate them? Have we fairly presented their work? We look forward to continuing the discussion on this topic and how to enhance practice for transformative change.

    Anna Mountford-Zimdars is a Professor in Education at the University of Exeter.

    Louise Ashley is Associate Professor in the School of business and management at Queen Mary University London.

    Eve Worth is a Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter.

    Christopher James Playford is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Exeter.


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    Second-generation student borrowers

    by Ariane de Gayardon

    Since the 1980s, massification, policy shifts, and changing ideas about who benefits from higher education have led to the expansion of national student loan schemes globally. For instance, student loans were introduced in England in 1990 and generalized in 1998. Australia introduced income-contingent student loans in the late 1980s. While federal student loans were introduced in the US in 1958, their number and the amount of individual student loan debt ramped up in the 1990s.

    A lot of academic research has analysed this trend, evaluating the effect of student loans on access, retention, success, the student experience, and even graduate outcomes. Yet, this research is based on the choices and experiences of first-generation student borrowers and might not apply to current and future students.

    First-generation borrowers enter higher education with parents who have either not been to higher education, or who have a tertiary degree that pre-dates the expansion of student loans. The parents of first-generation borrowers therefore did not take up loans to pay for their higher education and had no associated repayment burden in adulthood. Any cost associated with these parents’ studies will likely have been shouldered by their families or through grants.

    Second-generation borrowers are the offspring of first-generation borrowers. Their parents took out student loans to pay for their own higher education. The choices made by second-generation borrowers when it comes to higher education and its funding could significantly differ from first-generation borrowers, because they are impacted by their parents’ own experience with student loans.

    Parents and parental experience indeed play an important role in children’s higher education choices and financial decisions. On the one hand, parents can provide financial or in-kind support for higher education. This is most evident in the design of student funding policies which often integrate parental income and financial contributions. In many countries, eligibility for financial aid is means-tested and based on family income (Williams & Usher, 2022). Examples include the US where an Expected Family Contribution is calculated upon assessment of financial need, or Germany where the financial aid system is based on a legal obligation for parents to contribute to their children’s study costs. Indeed, evidence shows that parents do contribute to students’ income. In Europe, family contributions make up nearly half of students’ income (Hauschildt et al, 2018). But the role of parents also extends to decisions about student loans: parents tend to try and shield their children from student debt, helping them financially when possible or encouraging cost-saving behaviour (West et al, 2015).

    On the other hand, parents transmit financial values to their children, which might play a role in their higher education decisions. Family financial socialization theory states that children learn their financial attitudes and behaviour from their parents, through direct teaching and via family interactions and relationships (Gudmunson & Danes, 2011). Studies indeed show the intergenerational transmission of social norms and economic preferences (Maccoby, 1992), including attitudes towards general debt (Almenberg et al, 2021). Continuity of financial values over generations has been observed in the specific case of higher education. Parents who received parental financial support for their own studies are more likely to contribute toward their children’s studies (Steelman & Powell, 1991). For some students, negative parental experiences with general debt can lead to extreme student debt aversion (Zerquera et al,2016).

    As countries globally rely increasingly on student loans to fund higher education, many more students will become second-generation borrowers. Because their parents had to repay their own student debt, the family’s financial assets may be depleted, potentially leading to reduced levels of parental financial support for higher education. This is likely to be even worse for students whose parents are still repaying their loans. In addition, parental experiences of student debt could influence the advice they give their children with regard to higher education financial decisions. As a result, this new generation of student borrowers will face challenges that their predecessors did not, fuelled by the transmitted experience of student loans from their parents (Figure 1).

    Figure 1 – Parental influence on second-generation borrowers

    As the share of second-generation borrowers in the student body increases, the need to understand the decision-making process of these students when it comes to (financial) higher education choices is essential. Although the challenges faced by borrowers will emerge at different times and with varying intensity across countries — depending in part on loan repayment formats — we have an opportunity now to be ahead of the curve. By researching this new generation of student borrowers and their parents, we can better assess their financial dilemmas and the support they need, providing further evidence to design future-proof equitable student funding policies.

    Ariane de Gayardon is Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) based at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.


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    Graduate outcomes: Beyond numbers, towards quality?

    by Tej Nathwani and Ghislaine Dell

    with a foreword and afterword by SRHE Network Convenors Tracy Scurry and Daria Luchinskaya

    Foreword

    As many of us working with graduate employment statistics will know, it’s difficult to find up-to-date large-scale data of graduates’ experiences of work. In the SRHE event Exploring graduate outcomes: Do we need to look beyond earnings and occupation?, Tej Nathwani (HESA) introduced a new graduate outcomes measure capturing subjective aspects of job quality, while Ghislaine Dell (Head of Careers at Bath University and member of the AGCAS Research and Knowledge Committee) reflected on the implications from a practitioner perspective. In this follow-up blog, Tej and Ghislaine comment on the issues in capturing subjective graduate outcomes and outline directions for future research. HESA is keen to get your feedback on its measures: see the end of the blog for how to get in touch.

    Capturing job quality in HESA’s Graduate Outcomes survey

    Tej Nathwani

    Since the financial crisis, there has been a fundamental rethink about the way we measure economic and societal progress, with greater attention now given to subjective forms of data. At the individual or micro level, this has resulted in growing international interest in the quality of work – essentially those parts of our employment that correlate with our wellbeing. From a UK perspective, Scotland led the way in bringing this matter to the forefront with the formation of the Fair Work Convention. Not long after, we saw the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices published, which recommended the dissemination of regular data on eighteen job quality indicators covering seven broad dimensions.

    Graduate outcomes in the UK have historically been assessed solely on the basis of earnings and whether individuals find themselves working in professional or managerial occupations. Yet, research examining the aspirations of higher education students indicates that they want a career that uses their skills, aligns with their ambitions and that can enable them to make impact. Under the Fair Work Convention framework, these aspects embody fulfilling employment. Furthermore, funding and regulatory bodies also want to see all graduates find such work.

    With no data currently available on this matter, this clearly represents an information gap in graduate labour market statistics. As an organisation that adheres to the Code of Practice for Statistics, HESA have therefore started to conduct research to fill this space. This has involved using three questions in the Graduate Outcomes questionnaire relating to these features of employment to form a single composite measure that captures fulfilment (or the ‘job design and nature of work’ as it is also commonly referred to). Our ambition is to introduce this into our official statistics/open data in forthcoming years.

    Indeed, with the importance of job quality set to grow, one pathway we are currently exploring for the future development of the Graduate Outcomes survey is the addition of new questions on other elements of decent work, as identified by the Measuring Job Quality Working Group.    

    Ghislaine Dell

    Students make career decisions for very personal and subjective reasons. Recent research from Cibyl shows us that the most frequently looked for qualities in students’ career choices are interesting work, career progression, good work-life balance, and training & development. This matches very well to the proposed new job quality indicator. The Government’s continued emphasis on degrees offering good return on investment is at odds with what the workforce of the future are seeking. Notably, Tej’s analysis showed that, after about £25,000, higher salary does not increase graduates’ reported wellbeing, but more fulfilling work, as captured by the new measures, does. From a governmental and individual perspective, then, knowing what jobs are ‘good jobs’ is important for a thriving society. An indicator which focuses on fulfilment could enable students to make a more informed choice between possible career directions.

    However, there is a potential issue around the way in which we can capture this. For example, if we take ‘I am utilising what I learnt in my studies in my work’. Many graduate jobs are discipline-agnostic, and so a chemist, for example, would not be using ‘what they learnt’ in terms of Chemistry, in a financial services job. HESA’s cognitive testing of its survey questions provides a starting point for understanding how respondents are likely to approach these statements. However, further development of the phrasing of these questions is arguably necessary to ensure that the explanation of ‘skills mismatch’ isn’t simply attributable to graduates working in a field different to the one they studied.

     A key challenge will be to work on improving response rates so that each provider can report on this new measure with confidence. Currently, the subjective “graduate voice” questions in Graduate Outcomes are not compulsory, they rarely form part of the official narrative and minimal time is devoted to analysing and understanding the responses. If we are truly to maximise the potential of this measure, these issues need to be addressed.

    The new measure both fills an information gap and provides a lever for inclusion of job quality into official statistics augmenting its importance for governments and providers.

    Afterword

    The lively discussion that followed this SRHE event, organised by the Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning Network, reflects the genuine interest and excitement in being able to gather job quality statistics at scale for the first time. HESA is plugging the long-standing information gap, enabling new research directions to take off in practitioner, academic and policy communities and providing better careers information, advice and guidance to students and graduates. There is still work to be done to improve the measures and scope to expand the coverage of job quality indicators in particular extending understanding of how students interpret and understand these questions. Your feedback, whether based on experience or research, can help in the future development of this measure.

    Feedback on the types of statistics users would like to see incorporated into HESA open data based on the new measure are most welcome, as are views on potential amendments/additions to the Graduate Outcomes survey. Please send your thoughts to official.statistics@hesa.ac.uk.

    For more information about the Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning Network and future events please see: Employability, Enterprise and Work-based Learning | SRHE

    For more information about AGCAS and the Research and Knowledge Committee please see: Research and Knowledge from AGCAS

    Contributors

    Tej Nathwani is a Principal Researcher (Economist) at HESA, which is now part of Jisc.

    Ghislaine Dell is Head of Careers, University of Bath and member of AGCAS’ Research and Knowledge Committee.

    SRHE Network Convenors: Dr Daria Luchinskaya is a Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde Business School and Professor Tracy Scurry is a Professor of Work and Employment at Newcastle University Business School.