Schooling and unequal outcomes in youth and adulthood

Background

This major ESRC project addressed the role of schooling in determining educational attainment, occupational outcomes and social mobility.

Research details

Project title

Schooling and unequal outcomes in youth and adulthood

Project lead

Alice Sullivan

Themes

Education

Employment, income and wealth

Social mobility

Dates

October 2013 – July 2017

Funder

ESRC

Summary

This major ESRC project addressed the role of schooling in determining educational attainment, occupational outcomes and social mobility.

A key aim of the project was to repair the BCS70 1986 school data via both retrospective and administrative information, and to input previously unavailable cognitive scores from 1986. These variables are now available via the UK Data Service.

 

Outputs

News

Elite universities, fields of study and top salaries: Which degree will make you rich?

This blog post is based on the article ‘Elite universities, fields of study and top salaries: Which degree will make you rich?’ published in the British Educational Research Journal.

29 May 2018
Publication

Grammar schools don't give pupils a better chance of getting into elite universities

Alice Sullivan shares findings from this research project in an article published on The Conversation.

21 November 2014

The elusive leg-up

In this opinion piece for the ESRC’s Britain in 2015 magazine, Alice Sullivan examines the influence of social origins on educational chances for the 1970 cohort.

3 November 2014

Featured scientific publications

Sullivan, A., Parsons, S., Ploubidis, G., Green, F., Wiggins, R.D. (2020)
Pathways from origins to destinations: Stability and change in the roles of cognition, private schools and educational attainment
The British Journal of Sociology
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Sullivan, A., Parsons, S., Ploubidis, G., Wiggins, R. D., & Green, F. (2020)
Education and psychological distress in adolescence and mid-life: Do private schools make a difference?
British Educational Research Journal
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Wiggins, R. D., Parsons, S., Green, F., Ploubidis, G., & Sullivan, A. (2020)
Does private schooling make you right-wing?
CLS Working Paper
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Green, F., Henseke, G., Parsons, S., Sullivan, A., & Wiggins, R. (2018)
Do private school girls marry rich?
Longitudinal and Life Course Studies
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Sullivan, A., Parsons, S., Green, F., Wiggins, R.D., Ploubidis, G., Huynh, T. (2018)
Educational attainment in the short and long term: was there an advantage to attending faith, private and selective schools for pupils in the 1980s?
Oxford Review of Education
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Sullivan, A., Parsons, S., Green, F., Wiggins, R., Ploubidis, G. (2018)
Elite universities, fields of study and top salaries: Which degree will make you rich?
British Educational Research Journal Volume 44, Issue 4, Pages 663-680 2018
Read the full paper
Green, F., Parsons, S., Sullivan, A. and Wiggins, R. (2017)
Dreaming big: Self-evaluations, aspirations, high-valued social networks, and the private school earnings premium.
Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 42, Issue 3, Pages 757–778, 2017
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Parsons, S., Green, F., Ploubidis, G.B., Sullivan, A., Wiggins, R.D. (2017)
The influence of private primary schooling on children's learning: Evidence from three generations of children living in the UK
British Educational Research Journal, Volume 43, Issue 5, 2017
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Sullivan, A., Parsons, S., Green, F., Wiggins, R.D., Ploubidis, G.B. (2017)
The path from social origins to top jobs: social reproduction via education
The British Journal of Sociology, 2017
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Parsons, S.
Childhood cognition in the 1970 British Cohort Study
CLS Data Note, 2014
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Sullivan, A., Parsons, S., Wiggins, R., Heath, A. & Green, F. (2014)
Social origins, school type and higher education destinations
Oxford Review of Education, Volume 40, Issue 6, 2014.
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Parsons, S., Green, F., Sullivan, A., Wiggins, D. (2016)
Higher Education and Occupational Returns: do returns vary according to students’ social origins?
Report to UUK and CLS working paper 2016/3. London: Centre for Longitudinal Studies.
Read the full paper

Researchers

Alice Sullivan Professor of Sociology and Head of Research for the Social Research Institute

Phone: 020 7612 6661
Email: alice.sullivan@ucl.ac.uk

Alice’s research interests are focussed on social and educational inequalities and the intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage.

Francis Green UCL Institute of Education

Sam Parsons Principal Research Fellow

Phone: 020 7612 6882
Email: sam.parsons@ucl.ac.uk

Sam has a long history of producing research based on the British Birth Cohorts, from the antecedents and consequences of poor basic skills in adult life, to more recent research focusing on poorer outcomes for children with Special Education Needs, the gendered occupational occupations of teenagers and the long-term advantages for men and women who attended a private school and/or an elite university.

George Ploubidis Professor of Population Health and Statistics and Principal Investigator of the National Child Development Study and 1970 British Cohort Study

Phone: 020 7612 6107
Email: g.ploubidis@ucl.ac.uk

George is Professor of Population Health and Statistics at the UCL Social Research Institute and currently holds the posts of Principal Investigator of the National Child Development Study and 1970 British Cohort Study at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies. Prior to joining UCL he held posts at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Cambridge. George is a multidisciplinary quantitative social scientist and a longitudinal population surveys methodologist. His main research interests relate to socioeconomic and demographic determinants of health over the life course and the mechanisms that underlie generational differences in health and mortality. His methodological work in longitudinal surveys focusses on applications for handling missing data, causal inference and measurement error.

Dick Wiggins Emeritus Professor

Phone: 020 7911 5411
Email: d.wiggins@ucl.ac.uk

Dick’s current research interests include the impact of fee-pay schooling on adult outcomes and voting, the measurement of subjective well-being (https://casp19.com) as well as patterns of consent in response to requests to link survey and administrative data.

He is committed to the value of life course research and methodological rigour notably, strategies to handling missing data, structural equation modelling and data visualization.

Relevant studies

Contact us

Centre for Longitudinal Studies
UCL Social Research Institute

20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL

Email: clsdata@ucl.ac.uk

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