Are working-class applicants excluded from the UK’s top jobs?

A new report from the UK’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission—“Non Educational Barriers to the Elite Professions”—indicates that working-class applicants are struggling to gain access to top legal, accountancy, and financial services jobs in the UK.

Based on interviews with staff from 13 elite firms—together responsible for 45,000 of the best jobs in the country—the study reveals a tendency to recruit the majority of new entrants from a narrow group of premier universities, where students are more likely to have attended selective or fee-paying schools, and/or come from relatively affluent backgrounds.

In addition, the propensity to define “talent” in terms of drive, resilience, strong communication skills, plus confidence and “polish,” appears to favor those with a middle-class status and socialization.

The report offers three key recommendations for firms wishing to counter this trend:

• amend recruitment strategies to encourage more applications from students with a wider range of educational and socio-economic backgrounds;
• provide similar levels of support to more diverse candidates as those enjoyed by their peers, so that they can navigate the selection process more effectively;
• question current definitions of talent, including how potential is identified and assessed, to ensure that disadvantaged students are not ruled out for reasons of background rather than aptitude and skill.

Our authors have explored approaches to minimizing inequality early in a young person’s life. Tuomas Pekkarinen has studied the effect of school tracking (segregating or “streaming” students into different types of school on the basis of ability), arguing that postponement of tracking can increase social mobility without adverse effects on educational achievement.

He notes that, because educational tracks differ in curricular content and in the further educational opportunities they provide, early tracking could reduce social mobility between generations. Early tracking decisions are more likely determined by parental background than by a student’s innate abilities.

Paul J. Devereux has also compiled strong evidence to suggest that encouraging the educational attainment of children from poorer families reduces inequality in current and future generations. He suggests that better-educated parents are more likely to invest more time and money in their children, thus enhancing their future labor outcomes.

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission’s report can be read in full here

Related articles:
School tracking and intergenerational social mobility, by Tuomas Pekkarinen
Intergenerational return to human capital, by Paul J. Devereux