Educational Credentials and Socio-economic Status Attainment

Abstract

The thesis of industrialism predicts a uniformity in the process of socio-economic status attainment and a dominance of universalistic criteria over particularistic ones in the status allocation process among industrial nations. With this prediction in mind, this study proposes to analyze the educational and socio-economic attainment process in Japan, the United States, and Britain. Social origins show significant effects on the attainment of various levels of educational credentials in all three societies. Our cohort analysis shows a trend of a decreasing effect of social origins on high school graduation and the attainment of O-level qualifications but reveals an opposite trend of an increasing effect of social origins on access to higher education.With regard to the process of socio-economic attainment, our cohort analysis reports an increasing relative importance of educational credentials over social origins among all three societies as predicted by the thesis of industrialism. However, the relative importance of educational credentials over social origins in socio-economic attainment and socio-economic returns to educational credentials show cross-national variations across our societies. These results suggest that the allocation processes of socio-economic resources in the three countries are influenced by the difference in their educational system and their structure of labor market.