The mobile society stalls at the gates of academe
By John Lloyd
Published: July 24 2009 20:52 | Last updated: July 24 2009 20:52
Making it has been the American dream for two centuries. Horatio Alger, who died 110 years ago this month, wrote dozens of hugely popular novels (Struggling Upward, Strive and Succeed) that imprinted the aspiration on millions of minds. In their pages boys would rise from poverty to the middle class, often through the kindly intercession of older men but always with a display of grit. The theme spanned the 19th-century Atlantic: Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) promoted the theme of social advancement through individual striving in Self Help (1859) and other works. The career of his fellow Scot Andrew Carnegie, moving from real childhood rags to world-beating riches in early middle age, gave foundation to such exhortations.
But where the myth had reality, it now has less. Recent studies show that the US is near the top, and the UK in the upper levels, of the league of developed states in which the poor do not or cannot help themselves to rise. One much quoted study* notes that “the idea of the US as ‘the land of opportunity’ persists; and clearly seems misplaced”.
Why? Education is at the root. In the land of opportunity, the immigrants of the 19th and early 20th century could rise – or at least their families could – with the burgeoning industrial economy. In 1914, Ford’s workers were three-quarters foreign-born, and their jobs did become as solid and middle-class as Alger imagined – if more through militant unions than kindly benefactors. Now, the good jobs need at least one college degree: a PhD is no longer synonymous with genteel scholarly shabbiness but can be leveraged into great wealth, personal and corporate.
George Borjas, the economist, reckons that where children of immigrant parents had, for much of the last century, easily surpassed the earnings of their fathers and mothers, they now more often stick at the same level. Because US immigrants are disproportionately little-educated Mexicans, and because they tend to stay in Hispanic enclaves, their ability and willingness to mount the academic ladder is limited. The lesson travels: acculturation to norms of ambition, improvement through education and willingness to integrate into the broader society (which means a loss of distinct identity) are good ideas for social mobility in all societies. Insofar as some communities – including indigenous working-class communities – wish to emphasise their difference, their place on the lower rungs of class society will remain.
Thus, curiously, the university becomes an ambiguous social factor. The more education it confers, the better the possibility for advancement up through the classes. But it also functions as a filter: the professions, and higher earnings, are now so routinely associated with the degrees it gives that those without its benison find the career and class bonds tighter than ever. This seems true everywhere: a study of Latin American social mobility showed that the greater the expenditure by governments on primary and secondary schooling, the greater the mobility – yet “relatively greater public spending on tertiary education may actually reinforce the impact of family background and reduce intergenerational mobility”.
Concern over the effects of a divided society – accented by the effects of the financial crisis – is now rising. This week’s British Cabinet Office report on access to the professions presents the narrowing of access in stark terms, forecasting a kind of caste society in which professionals are drawn largely from the 30 per cent of the most highly educated (and higher social classes) of the population. This is true of all professions in wealthy countries – even as they have recruited more women, as the gender pay gap has fallen and as minority groups have seen their representation in the professions rise.
Which societies do better? We should remember that all of the advanced societies have done “well” since the war: there has been a huge shift, from working to middle class. In London, half of the working population is classified as managerial or professional; that goes down to one in five in some parts of the UK but is common in other dynamic world cities. But this is the mobility of classes, in which all advanced societies have shared: individual and family mobility – another irony – seems better served in states with a strong social democratic tradition. In the Scandinavian countries, Denmark in particular, movement up (and down) is better lubricated.
One cannot have everything. The international tables of top universities are dominated by the US and the UK, which cater for global as well as their own elites. Hard-driving and expensive private schools are embedded in the Anglo-American social fabrics; the Cabinet Office report shows that some professions – such as the judiciary and journalism – are at the higher levels dominated by their products. When this writer began in a provincial newsroom, he was one of two graduates; the route to national glory could still be trod by a school leaver with shorthand and sharp elbows. Now, it would be far more difficult.
Education needs aspiration – and aspiration needs sharp elbows, too. Parental ambition is, says the British report, four times more useful than any other factor: parents who push for entry to better schools, or better schooling in the one they get, are the real motor forces of a dynamic society. The antidote to social ossification would thus seem to be a new kind of class struggle, a storming of the frozen winter palaces that tutor and employ our increasingly entrenched elites.
* Intergenerational mobility in Europe and North America: Blanden, Gregg and Machin (LSE, 2005)
The writer is an FT columnist
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd
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