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Introduction
Social mobility has risen in prominence in UK public and political discourse over the past decade. The Deputy Prime Minister unveiled his Social Mobility Strategy in 2011 and improving social mobility was described as the 'principal goal' of the coalition's social policy (Cabinet Office, 2011). In both the UK and US increased public investment in education is often mooted as the solution to the perceived problem of the intergenerational transmission of inequality. For example, in 2014, President Obama stated 'There aren't many things that are more important to that idea of economic mobility... than a good education' and the UK Government monitors 17 'leading indicators' of mobility, 11 of which are based on educational achievement gaps between those coming from more and less advantaged backgrounds.1
Studies on the role of education in intergenerational mobility date back to the early 1980s within the economics literature (Atkinson, 1980; Atkinson and Jenkins, 1984) and are found even further back within sociology (Duncan and Hodge, 1963). The idea is that the stronger the association between family background and education, the more persistent intergenerational inequalities will be. Recent empirical studies have sought to decompose the association between status across generations into two parts; one related to education and the other quantifying the direct impact of family background on children's outcomes. In the UK education measures can account for over 50 per cent of this link across generations (Blanden et al., 2007).
Educational achievement has expanded dramatically across the world in recent years. In 1960 just five per cent of British young people attended university and growth was slow until the late 1980s when it took off dramatically, rising by more than 15 percentage points in five years. By the mid-1990s university attendance rates topped 30 per cent and have remained above this level ever since (Finegold, 2006). The growth in demand for university education has been enabled by an increase in educational attainment at earlier stages in the system, which started with the introduction of the GCSE in 1988. Government allowed universities to respond by increasing supply but growing financial pressures led to the introduction of fees and a switch from public support to loans; with an accompanying debate about the impact of reforms on...