Like Parents, Like Children - The Effects of Social Origins on Children's Higher Educational Attainment in the UK

Sammanfattning: An educated populace is a prerequisite for a functioning modern society. Educational inequality based on social origins might therefore have large economic consequences for both individuals and society at large. This paper studies how two measures of social origins, social class and parental education, affect the probability of individuals completing an undergraduate degree in the UK. We have used panel data from three cohort studies administered by The Centre for Longitudinal Studies to perform linear probability regressions on how social origins affect degree completion over time. Our results indicate that the effect of social origins largely remained constant between cohorts born 1958 and 1970, but massively decreased in importance for individuals born in 1990. Furthermore, we are able to show how most of this effect seems to be mediated through educational attainment prior to higher education, and how social origin remains highly important in determining who graduates from the most selective universities in the 1990 cohort. Taken together, our study suggests that social origins appear to have become less important in determining whether an individual completes an undergraduate degree in the UK, but that it still has a large effect on from which institution an individual graduates.