TY  - INPR
KW  - Social Sciences
KW  -  Education & Educational Research
KW  -  bottom-to-top mobility rate
KW  -  status maintenance rate
KW  -  middle-class mobility rate
KW  -  intergenerational social mobility
KW  -  higher education
TI  - A Social Ladder or a Glass Floor? The Role of Higher Education in Intergenerational Social Mobility: Empirical Evidence from South Korea
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1057/s41307-021-00241-1
AV  - public
JF  - Higher Education Policy
EP  - 30
N1  - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher?s terms and conditions.
ID  - discovery10138838
PB  - PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD
Y1  - 2021/06/28/
A1  - Lee, S
N2  - Though various measures of mobility rate for colleges, e.g. bottom-to-top mobility rate, status maintenance rate, and middle-class mobility rate, have been introduced, they have rarely been reviewed together to see the whole picture of intergenerational mobility, particularly in non-Western societies. This paper fills this gap and characterises mobility rates for 17 different college tiers in South Korea using the Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey for 37,552 graduates from 2007 to 2010. It documents two main results. First, mobility rates are higher for males than for females in all three measures, indicating colleges in South Korea are less effective as a social ladder for females. Second, many selective colleges are more likely to play a role as a glass floor than a social ladder due to their lower low-income access, and ?selective public? colleges are the engines of upward social mobility for students from the bottom three quintiles. Though people believe education is the single greatest hope to achieve upward social mobility, these findings cast doubt on the idea that college attendance alone can promote social mobility. This paper does not necessarily identify causal relationships that can be manipulated to improve mobility rates; however, it documents various patterns of interest to policymakers.
ER  -