Class, Family, Education, and the Process of Status Attainment: A Comparison of American and British Women College Graduates

Abstract

Turner's conceptualization of the relationship between education and social mobility in Great Britain and the United States as forming “sponsored” and “contest” systems is used as a theoretical framework for comparing the process of occupational status attainment of British and American women college graduates. British women graduates are more occupationally mobile than Americans; they gain more from attending prestigious institutions, studying science and mathematics and securing a higher class degree as compared with American women with similar qualifications. American graduate women benefit more from attaining a Ph.D. Marriage and motherhood have less significant, but different, cross-national effects.