Social mobility through higher education: exploratory analysis of ethno-racial, gender and class intersection in professional undergraduate programmes

ABSTRACT

Higher education and elite professional occupations are considered to be key sources of social mobility. In this paper, we suggest that examining patterns of admission into professional undergraduate programmes, a key route for entry into elite professional occupations, may provide important insights into social mobility through higher education. We analyse university admission offer data and assess the impact of ethno-racial, gender and class intersection on relative likelihood of student admission to six elite professional programmes (medicine, law, accounting, architecture, engineering and business management), in comparison to non-professional programmes. Our exploratory analysis provides several interesting results; though they present a generally pessimistic picture of potential social mobility through higher education. We find that higher class background is a key factor in admissions to elite professional programmes, especially evident in the exemplar traditional professions of medicine and law; presumed gender effects on entry into technical math-based professional programmes, such as engineering and accounting, are substantially moderated by class background; and ethno-racial background may mitigate some of the class penalties for women, but leads to double penalty for black men. Our findings contribute directly to the current research on impact of class origin on social mobility, especially that on class ceiling. Further, we respond to recent calls for fuller inclusion of class in intersectionality-based research by showing how class may work both through and against other social factors, such as race and gender.

KEYWORDS:

• Social mobility
• intersectionality
• race, gender and class
• class ceiling
• higher education
• professions and occupations

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Christian Schneijderberg for his clear editorial guidance, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and developmental comments, which greatly improved the clarity and contribution of this paper. In addition, we are grateful to Daniel Muzio, Geoff Payne and Andreas Giazitzoglu for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).