Report

Degrees of difference

This report from UK think tank the Sutton Trust compares intergenerational social mobility and higher education in the US and UK.

Social mobility remains a key challenge for both the UK and US. Despite successive governments stating a clear desire to improve social mobility and putting in place bodies to promote this (for example, the UK’s Social Mobility Commission), the 2020 Global Social Mobility Index, produced by the World Economic Forum, ranked the UK and US in 21st and 27th positions, respectively. This indicates that there is much more work to be done to level the playing field and equalise access to opportunity.

In both the UK and the US, university is still the dominant route to higher earnings for those from less advantaged backgrounds, and selective institutions can deliver particularly strong outcomes for these students. However, the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds attending these institutions is still small. Within the US, students from low-income backgrounds are poorly represented within elite institutions and the UK universities that perform best with respect to graduate outcomes often have few students from low-income backgrounds.

This report, produced by a team led by Rachel Brooks (Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Education, University of Oxford), uses multiple methods to address the key research question: ‘What can the UK and US learn from international tertiary education systems to improve their capacity for education to be a driver of social mobility?’.

Alongside an exploration of the academic and non-academic literature, the research includes: individual expert interviews; quantitative analyses of secondary data (the OECD’s Programme for the Assessment of Adult Competencies); qualitative analyses of policy documents from the nine case study countries; and four workshops with members of the extensive networks of CGHE and SKOPE.