Social Mobility and the Professions

(2009) - Lindsey Macmillan

Journal: The Leverhulme Trust
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Tags:: #paper #Mobility #NCDS #SocialClass #BCS
Cite Key:: [@Macmillan2009]

Abstract

As part of the new White Paper on Social Mobility, Alan Milburn MP has been appointed to Chair a new panel on ‘Fair access to the Professions’ which aims to examine potential barriers that prevent fair access to the best paid jobs. Previous evidence on this subject by the Sutton Trust (2005)1 examined the change in educational characteristics of those entering into the legal profession from 1988/89 to 2005. They found that over half of the partners at leading law firms, three quarters of judges and two thirds of barristers had attended private school despite only 7% of the total population attending private school. This would suggest there are some very serious barriers to entry into the law profession. A number of professions were singled out for criticism in recent reports with Milburn stating in an article for the Sunday Times that ‘too few youngsters from comprehensive schools were becoming lawyers, doctors or army officers’2. This research aims to examine the family income and cognitive ability in childhood of those who go on to a number of different professions in adulthood. To achieve this, I compare the average family incomes and abilities in childhood of those that go on to these different professions using the two British Birth Cohorts, the National Child Development Survey (NCDS) born in 1958, and the British Cohort Study (BCS) born in 1970. This will give an indication of whether different professions are socially graded, whether these have changed across time and whether this may be driven by differences in ability across individuals. In the next section I will discuss the cohort data used followed by the main findings relating to income and ability. I will end with some brief conclusions. The findings suggest that professions such as law and medicine have large social gradients compared to other professions such as teaching and nursing and that these gradients have grown over time. Although those from these highly socially graded professions exhibit higher ability than those from the other professions, the gradient in ability appears to decline across time. There appears to be a widening social gap in entry to the top professions regardless of the ability of the individual.

Notes

“he evidence suggests that those that go on to become lawyers and doctors were from substantially richer families than those that went on to become engineers or nurses and compared to the sample average at age 16” (Macmillan, 2009, p. 10)