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This paper focuses on the relationship between social engagement, particularly civic engagement, and education. It is well known that more highly educated people are more likely to engage in voluntary work in formalized settings. It has been difficult to disentangle the effect of higher education from that of family origin and occupational socialization. This paper examines the effects of tertiary education on the social and civic engagement of young people, using the British Household Panel Study. The social and civic activity of young people is observed in their late teens, before entering the labour market or tertiary education, and compared with that of the same young people in their early 20s, after completing tertiary education courses or gaining labour market experience. It was found that the social and civic engagement of young people who would enter higher education was higher in their late teens than that of their peers who did not enter. However, higher education had a small additional effect on civic engagement, for both young and mature students. The children of professionals were the social grouping most likely to be involved in civic activities. The relationship of higher education, professional occupations and family socialization is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reply by Richard Breen and John H. Goldthorpe to Peter Saunders' criticisms about their work on meritocracy in Great Britain. Saunders has argued, on the basis of analyses of the National Child Development Study data-set, that present-day Britain is to a large extent a meritocratic society: where individuals end up within the class structure is largely determined by their ability and effort. Saunders' difficulties stem in large part from his original concern to expose British sociologists' commitment to what he has labelled the social advantages and disadvantages (SAD) thesis. In both our previous papers our aim has been simply to test the meritocracy thesis--not to support the SAD thesis, nor to run a competition between the two theses. In our first paper our strategy was to begin by establishing the level and pattern of the class origins-class destinations association and then to see what happens to this association when the individual merit variables of ability, effort and educational attainment, as best these can be constructed, are brought into the analysis. Saunders now contends that this approach is flawed and in fact biased against the meritocracy thesis because of problems of measurement error and of omitted variables. But in neither respect do his arguments stand up to examination. It is apparent that Saunders' misunderstandings arise from the fact that he seeks to impose upon us the strategy of the variable race that he himself favors. Thus, he contends that in our approach any residual variation in class outcomes is automatically attributed to class origins or, in other words, the default is set to favor the SAD thesis. Finally in this connection we would note that in our second paper addressing the meritocracy thesis, we develop our original approach to try to mitigate both problems of measurement error and those of deciding just how closely a particular society at a particular point in time approximates the meritocratic ideal.

Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy-makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to estimate the effect of educational participation and qualification attainment on rates of intergenerational social class mobility. Because, in expectation, children born immediately before and after the policy was implemented are statistically exchangeable, the difference in the amount of education they received may be treated as exogenously determined. The exogenous nature of the additional education gain means that differences in rates of social mobility between cohorts affected by the reform can be treated as having been caused by the additional education. The data for the analysis come from the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links individual records from successive decennial censuses between 1971 and 2001. Our findings show that, although the reform resulted in an increase in educational attainment in the population as a whole and a weakening of the association between attainment and class origin, there was no reliably discernible increase in the rate of intergenerational social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the pattern of educational homogamy in Ireland and Britain. Using contemporary data on recent marriages from the early 1970s through to the mid-1990s, we show that these two countries share a broadly similar pattern of educational homogamy, which is quasi-symmetric in character, with no tendency for women to marry up over and above that which can be attributed to the gender difference in educational attainment. In the 1970s, the strength of homogamy was much weaker in Ireland than in Britain. But we discern a clear inter-country difference in how the net strength of homogamy has changed over time. While it has declined in Britain since the 1970s, in Ireland the strength of homogamy has first increased and then levelled off. Our findings are inconsistent with the inverted U-shaped relationship between economic development and homogamy reported by Smits, Ultee and Lammers (1998) - an argument premised on secular change in the criteria of spouse selection. Instead, our results are better understood in terms of Mare's (1991) life course argument that homogamy is inversely related to the time-gap between school departure and first marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous paper published in "British Journal of Sociology," the author made the claim that despite decades of intensive investigation, not a single researcher had ever shown that class difference in education was indeed unfair and unjust. It was a charge that was underwritten by a simple, if technical, argument, which drew attention to what, in logic, would have to be shown if such a difference was to be regarded as an inequality, rather than as just another difference in a differentiated society. In this case, it was suggested that, other things being equal, the researcher would have to meet one of two conditions. He would have to show that the different classes were similarly disposed to education or, alternatively, if there were evidence, as in Great Britain, of considerable working-class indifference to education, he would need to demonstrate that such indifference was itself the result of structural or cultural inequality. Only then, it was argued, could the researcher be said to have reasonably shown that class difference in education was unfair; for only then could the researcher be reasonably sure that such a difference was not, after all, just another difference.