The false financier who duped two Oxford dons into admitting selling undergraduate places in return for donations was doing what comes naturally. Reproducing. Unless sprigs of the great British middle classes are irredeemably stupid, chances are they will follow in father's footsteps. If the son of the Sunday Times's bogus banker had not found shelter in the cloisters of Pembroke College, he would have secured a place somewhere else and in due course became another banker. The forces of intergenerational mobility are strong - except we should call them the forces of intergenerational immobility. In our society what goes up does not come down. Apart from offering £300,000 to morally stretched Oxford collegians, well-off parents tend to go on assisting their children long after they leave education. They deploy their implicit knowledge of how the world works, their contacts. They have what the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called social capital, long before that phrase became fashionable. The social set-up in one generation reproduces itself remarkably faithfully in the next. Snakes and ladders
Despite an apparent opening up, there is growing evidence that Britain
David Walker
is becoming a less socially mobile society. So is equality an illusion?
By coincidence, in the same week as Oxford was exposed, at the Royal Economic Society's annual meeting the UK's record on equalising opportunity has come under scrutiny. We live in a society where people dress similarly and, fat cats apart, disparities in reward are not often discussed. The illusion of equality marries the myth of meritocracy - you can get to the top, my girl, on the strength of your talent.
No: you get to the top because daddy or mummy is already there. Taking children born in 1958 and comparing how they turned out with children born in 1970, researchers found parents' earnings a strong indicator of where children end up on the income scale. It seems to have become stronger. In other words, if you come from a well-off family you too are likely to head a well-off family. (This is the principal finding by a team led by Stephen Machin of University College, London.)
It does not sound especially meritocratic. Another finding is that men who enter the same line of work as their father earn between 5% and 8% more than other people doing the same job. (Daughters who follow daddy don't earn more.) This pay premium is most noticeable among lawyers and brokers. Intergenerational links are strongest on the land and in medicine: 35% of graduate farmers and 20% of health professionals are doing the same job as their fathers.
The reason, as far as we can tell, is not nepotism. It's social capital again - meaning that dad or mum tells you the tricks of the trade and points you in the direction of the choicest pickings. Such findings are puzzling, given the huge expansion over the past four decades not just of higher education but also in those middle-class jobs graduates aspire to. The UK looks and feels like a more open society.
How can social mobility be said to have declined (the thesis advanced with rigour by John Goldthorpe of Nuffield College) when the salariat has so vastly expanded? The answer is that "more room at the top" has allowed social mobility to increase for children from lower social strata. But it has also permitted more children from higher-class backgrounds to remain in the same social class as their parents. Half the sons of class I parents are themselves in class I and a quarter of them are in class II - few have dropped lower.
The chart shows this. The working class has declined in size as manual jobs disappeared. Sons and daughters have moved up and out. But they have not displaced the middle classes. Over the 20th century, the trapdoor beneath the upper social groups became less and less the worry it was in the 19th - Victorian society was much more an affair of snakes and ladders. As sociologist Peter Saunders puts it, the safe guards against failure enjoyed by dull middle-class children are strengthening.
That is a quote from the paper on social mobility published last year by the performance and innovation unit in the Cabinet Office* - a paper for discussion and not, it was said, for policy. That's the problem. The policy implications are big and, needless to say, politically difficult, for left and right alike. The right dislike the idea that well-off parents should be stopped from giving their children a leg-up, however unmeritocratic this may be. When do Tories, even those claiming to be economic liberals, ever support inheritance taxes that bite?
The left has not entirely lost its suspicion of mobility, which seems to conflict with "community" and hazy memories of the working-class past. Goldthorpe has shown that the chances of manual workers' sons not doing anything but manual work have risen at the same time as manual jobs have declined: the latter is progress, the former not. Universities have expanded but their students tend to come from already well-off families. The amount of "equality of opportunity" may actually have fallen in recent years, despite that expansion of educational opportunity.
Back to the gleaming spires. Gordon Brown wants Oxford to admit more Laura Spences; Tony Blair wants it and other universities to admit more students full stop. But such policies may not make Britain any more mobile. That ambition might, paradoxically, require more failure by middle-class children. Rest assured, daddy and mummy will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.
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