Elina Kilpi-Jakonen

Does adult education contribute to securing non-precarious employment? A cross-national comparison

The objective of this article is to analyse the effect of acquiring a new formal qualification as an adult (measured as an upgrade or a side-step) on the likelihood of being in non-precarious employment. Three countries with similar longitudinal datasets are compared: Spain, the UK and Russia. The results indicate that adult education is beneficial in the three countries; with differences, however, depending on the definition of precarious employment used and the (previous) employment status of individuals. The findings suggest that the differences among countries are related to different labour market structures: adult education has a clearer beneficial impact on accessing and remaining in non-precarious employment in more flexible employment systems than in more rigid insider-outsider economies, where labour trajectories are strongly determined by what happens during the first years after school.

Institutional change and parental compensation in intergenerational attainment

Previous research has shown how institutional changes, such as educational expansion, have weakened parental influence on educational attainment. We extend this analysis to occupational attainment and put forth a parental compensation hypothesis: as the origin-education (OE) association weakens, parents act to compensate for this in order to maintain their influence on the childs occupational attainment. We should see this as a strengthened origin-destination association net of education (net OD). Further, we study whether these compensatory actions are triggered by changes in educational institutions and whether the institutional changes that reduce educational inequality are the same ones that prompt parental compensation. We have linked data from five waves of the European Social Survey (2002-10) with data on educational institutions matched to birth cohorts born 1941-80 in 25 countries. We find weakened OE and strengthened net OD associations, supporting our parental compensation hypothesis. Multilevel mixed effects regression analyses reveal that reforms lengthening compulsory education, and the increased access to and the attainment of higher education have had a positive influence on parental compensation. As a conclusion, a later school leaving age seems to secure increased parental influence on childrens occupational attainment, while parents seem to have reacted to a lesser extent on the changes in higher education.

Compensation and other forms of accumulation in intergenerational social inequality: The Role of Compensation and Multiplication in Resource Accumulation

Practically all modern political movements accept the ideal of equal opportunity in the context of intergenerational social inequality. That principle, also known as meritocracy, argues that adult status should not be determined by the socioeconomic status of the family you are born into. Rather, your own skills and motivation should decide the position in which you end up. This is good not only for equality but also for the efficiency of a society as this guarantees that the most suitable persons work in each task. In a society where skills are spread approximately evenly across children born into the families with different socioeconomic backgrounds, equality of opportunity is strongest when the inheritance of socioeconomic status is weakest (and there is the most intergenerational social mobility). Many countries have moved in this direction; the conclusion of existing research is that socioeconomic inheritance has weakened in most of the developed countries over the period after World War II (Ganzeboom et al. 1991; Treiman and Ganzeboom 2000; Hout and DiPrete 2006; for an exception, the United States, see Beller and Hout 2006). Yet parental background continues to play an important role in socioeconomic attainment in all societies. Parents with more resources are often able to guarantee their children a better-off position everywhere. It is often argued that perfect equality of opportunity is impossible to achieve. Even if this is the case, it should be possible to find out which societies and what policies have the biggest effects on social mobility. There have been successful attempts to rank countries according to the strength of the association between parent and child statuses (Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992; Aaberge et al. 2002; Breen 2004). Despite the merits of these studies, conclusions about the mechanisms that strengthen or weaken the association have nonetheless remained uncertain. The evidence suggests that some