The study of social mobility can be traced back around 100 years, but up until the turn of the millennium it remained largely an academic topic. While a few seminal papers on income mobility had been published in the 1990s, the Sutton Trust's 2005 report, 'Intergenerational Mobility in Europe and North America' signalled a new wave of social…

Context: Existing studies have explored the association between workplace training and wages suggesting that training participation may have a positive association with wages. However, we still know very little about whether this association varies between men and women. Through its potential positive association with wages, training may balance…

This interim report shares emerging findings and recommendations from a collaborative project. The project examines post-16 Education and Training (E&T) in the UK. It is focused on analysing the divergent approaches to E&T policy across the four devolved nations to understand more deeply the key policy issues and challenges facing E&T…

This paper investigates whether education weakens the relationship between early-life disadvantages and later-life SES. We use three proxies for advantage that we show are independently associated with SES in middle-age. Besides early, favorable family and neighborhood conditions, we argue that the genes a child inherits also represent a source of…

We quantify the returns to higher education for degree disciplines, namely 'professional' degrees, Medicine/Dentistry, Law, Accountancy and Psychology, within the UK from 2007 to 2015. We estimate the returns to education in the form of employment and wage premia associated with each subject. Our analysis contributes to the existing literature on…

Test-retest reliability assessments rarely investigate whether reliability itself is stable or change in reliability affects findings from substantive models. Research across the social sciences often recognizes that measurement error could influence results, yet it rarely applies established error correction methods. Focusing on gender wage…

Government backed income contingent student loans are an increasingly being used to fund higher education. An income contingent repayment plan acts as an incremental marginal tax on labor earnings, which could cause individuals to distort their work effort. This paper uses an administrative dataset from the UK that links student loan borrowers…

This brief analyzes the latest higher education data and government wage statistics to examine the number of unpaid graduate interns in the United Kingdom and the cost to an individual of doing an unpaid internship. It also includes newly published Ipsos Mori polling on attitudes to unpaid internships. Key findings in this brief include: (1) 31%…

A fundamental shift is taking place in the way we think about the future of work and its relationship to education, training and the labour market. Until recently, expanding higher education was widely believed to result in higher earnings, reflecting an insatiable demand for knowledge workers. In the United Kingdom, this race to higher education…

Exploiting information on foreign qualifications for the first time, we estimate the returns to obtaining UK higher degrees for foreign graduates who migrated to the UK in their 20s. Accounting for direct measures of foreign and UK qualifications and country-of-origin fixed effects, we find substantial returns to obtaining UK (higher) degrees on…

Mass expansion of the UK Higher Education (HE) sector is eroding its well-documented benefits -- leading many to question whether HE remains worthwhile. Avoiding the traditional approach of estimating the returns to HE, we investigate why many now feel that attending university will not yield any financial benefits. Using BSA data from 2010 we…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused complex challenges across the apprenticeship landscape. The unique position of apprenticeships -- which combine education, training and employment - has made the sector particularly vulnerable to the current health crisis. Impacts on training providers and access to learning are being compounded by the profound…

We investigate the extent to which graduate returns vary according to the class of degree achieved by UK university students and examine changes over time in estimated degree class premia. Using a variety of complementary datasets for individuals born in Britain around 1970 and aged between 30 and 40, we estimate an hourly wage premium for a…

Advocacy can help service users both to understand their rights and choices and also to support them in resolving issues of great significance to their lives. We investigated some of the costs and outcomes of advocacy provided to parents with learning disabilities at risk of having their children taken into care. Through two workshops and a…

A university degree is regarded as the "gold standard" to set young people up for their future careers, but it may not be the best path for potential graduates and others. With the ever increasing debt burden faced by graduates, and a glut of graduates in the labour market, might there be another option? This report looks at the…