Social class returns to higher education: comments on a paper by Bukodi and Goldthorpe with a response from the authors

Abstract

In a recent paper Bukodi E and Goldthorpe JH. (2011) ‘Social class returns to higher education: chances of access to the professional and managerial salariat for men in three British cohorts’. Longitudinal and Life Course Studies, 2, 185-201, 2011 the authors adopt a particular methodological approach to the study of ‘causality’ in life course research. This highlights an important area of contention among social scientists. We have therefore, with the authors’ agreement, taken this as an opportunity to open it up to a wider debate. In this issue of the journal we publish two commentaries, by Clarke, and by Legewie and Solga, that take issue with the Bukodi/Goldthorpe position on causality. The commentaries also question the relationship of the paper’s contribution to the existing economics literature on ‘returns to education’ and the manner in which ‘missing data values’ are handled by the authors. See also a relevant tutorial published in the journal Goldstein H. (2009) ‘Handling attrition and non-response in longitudinal data’. Longitudinal and Life Course Studies, 1, 6372, 2009 that discusses methods for dealing with missing data. We also publish a response by Bukodi and Goldthorpe to these commentaries. We are very grateful to the original authors as well as to those who contributed the commentaries, for taking the time to prepare their carefully argued positions. We hope that this kind of debate will form a regular feature of the journal and help to illuminate important methodological controversies, about which, of course, readers will form their own judgements.