Is Social Mobility an Echo of Educational Mobility? Parents’ Educations and Occupations and Their Children's Occupational Attainment

Quantitative studies of occupational attainment and intergenerational socialmobility have often devoted little attention to the roles of parental educationand educational inheritance. Informed by the ideas of authors who see classreproduction as reflecting more than occupations and economic resources(including Devine, Savage and Crompton), this paper assesses the importance ofparents’ educations, and considers the relevance of education to class analysisand class reproduction processes.Logistic regressions using British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data establishthe relative importance of parents’ educations and parents’ occupational classesas determinants of children's attainment of service class occupations. Thesemultivariate analyses reiterate the salience of mother's class, but also showthat mother's education has an independent impact. However, this is more limitedif both parents can be assigned to classes. The only difference betweendaughters and sons that is found in the impact of parental characteristics is aweaker impact of father's class on daughter's occupational attainment than onson's occupational attainment. For both daughters and sons, mother's educationand mother's class have an impact.The relationship between parents’ and children's educations accounts forrelatively little of the relationship between parents’ and children'soccupational classes. Hence intergenerational class mobility patterns do notsimply echo intergenerational educational mobility patterns. However, anexamination of the direct and indirect effects of parents’ educations andclasses on children's occupational attainment shows parental education to play asubstantial role in the intergenerational transmission of advantage, andindicates that part (but not all) of the relationship between class origin andoccupational attainment can be explained in terms of the intergenerationaltransmission of cultural capital. In contrast, a substantial part of theindirect effect of parental class via children's qualifications does not reflectparental education. Hence the conversion of parental economic resources intochildren's educational credentials also appears important.