Global education policy discourse is based on an unshakable belief that more and improved skills will promote economic prosperity, global competitiveness and social inclusion. In England, the Further Education and Skills sector (FES) has emerged as the vehicle to deliver these skills. However, the portrayal of FES as focusing primarily on…

Drawing on the narrative inquiry of 32 in-depth interviews with parents of sons who study in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields in tertiary education, we described the multi-dimensional picture of intergenerational mobility and reproduction derived from the Big Class, Microclass, and Cultural Mobility Models. We…

As undergraduate degrees have become increasingly common and their relative value has declined, employers increasingly look for evidence other than human capital that can distinguish one candidate from another. Both social and personal capital are important in this respect, but also create disadvantages for university graduates from less…

Shonda L. Goward argues that conflating first-generation and low-income status elides the specific and significant barriers poor students experience. They may share the experience of not being familiar with the university system, but the challenges of food insecurity, jobs, and family responsibilities, along with a lack of a safety net, make it…

The neoliberal agenda promotes education as a route toward success in university and career. However, a neoliberal economy requires large numbers of workers willing to accept low-paying, dead-end jobs. The students most likely to take these jobs are those who have struggled with literacy and so schools must, in Bourdieu's terms, re/produce,…

This article describes the work of Oscar Lewis, Paul Willis, and John U. Ogbu, who used the concept of culture to explain the difficulties some children had in schools. Although Lewis, Willis, and Ogbu were well trained as ethnographers and their work influenced educators, critics complained that their explanations did not fit their evidence. The…

Experience of entry into the workforce varies across societies (each offering a particular set of social conditions), and across social groups within a society. This article examines how urban Japanese working-class girls made sense of their first permanent full-time employment and conceived the transition to adulthood over the period 1989-92.…

America's older, larger cities are unable to provide employment opportunities and social mobility to its growing number of disadvantaged residents because cities' economic base of blue-collar industry has been replaced by the service and information industries. Cities currently face a residence-job opportunity mismatch. (ML)