Jiang, Yuyan; (2023) Essays on social mobility: the influence of educational attainment, bursaries, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis investigates three topics on intergenerational income persistence in a recent cohort in England and examines how factors such as educational attainment, bursaries, and the COVID-19 pandemic affect social mobility. All three chapters use longitudinal data on young people born in 1989-90 in England who are part of the cohort study Next Steps. The goal of this thesis is to provide evidence on the latest trends in social mobility in England and inform policymaking in equalising opportunities and reducing inequality. Chapter 1 introduces and motivates the thesis. Chapter 2 explores the level of intergenerational income persistence among sons, which is measured as the association between family income in childhood and later adult earnings, as well as examines its contributing factors using the most recent data available. Building on previous work, we then contextualise this persistence by comparing the younger cohort to the 1970 birth cohort. We focus on cognitive skills, non-cognitive traits, and educational attainment as mediating factors. Our results highlight the consistent intergenerational income mobility at age 25/26 across the two cohorts and the important role of education in explaining the persistence for both cohorts. In Chapter 3, I examine the impact of a financial programme targeted at low-income young people in England – the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) – on higher education (HE) participation and attainment. Combining regression modelling with entropy balancing, a statistical matching technique, I find that two-year EMA recipients are more likely to participate in higher education than non-recipients. However, the results show that EMA has no statistically significant impact on attendance at high-status institutions and degree classification. Moreover, the impact of receiving EMA for two-years has heterogeneous effects by gender. These findings indicate that even though EMA is a costly programme, it is beneficial for young people, especially young men, in the long run. The fourth chapter of this thesis compares the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labour market outcomes of first-in-family (FiF) graduates to the impact on their non-FiF peers, those young people whose parents have university degrees. We find a differential impact of the pandemic for FiF graduates by gender when we look at what happened to those who did not keep working. Among women, FiF graduates became more likely to leave work or be on unpaid leave and less likely to go on furlough or paid leave than non-FiF graduates. However, we do not find a significant differential effect for FiF versus non-FiF male graduates. This highlights the exacerbated disadvantage arising from the intersectionality of socio-economic background and gender during the pandemic.

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