Toward a developmental transactional model of educational upward mobility
Abstract
There is a disconnect between theoretical depictions of educational upward mobility (EUM) and empirical evidence. Although the Origin-Education-Destination (OED) triangle, a functionalist model in its ideal meritocratic state, posits education as the key mediator between one's origin and destination, efforts to address inequality through higher education have not always proven successful across regions and generations. This paper proposes an adapted theoretical model of EUM, drawing on critical theoretical analysis from multidisciplinary perspectives—including the functionalist perspective of education, Bordieuan critiques of social reproduction, and the ecological-transactional theory of human development—to capture the interplay of developmental processes and structural inequalities. Departing from the original linear mediation approach of OED, the new model attempts to account for research findings of how origin factors moderate the E-D association, and how educational institutions and programmes can moderate the O-D relationship by leveraging social reproduction theory and the ecological-transactional framework. The transactional developmental lens adopted by this article illuminates EUM as a dynamic, fluid process of human development involving ongoing, dialectic transactions between individual agency and the ecological context across life courses. A critical review of existing psychological and sociological theories in the domain of EUM highlights the need for more fine-grained longitudinal data and diverse approaches to change the status quo by considering individual differences, micro-relational dynamics and macro structures across the ecology and across development. The article also acknowledges, however, the methodological, theoretical and contextual limitations of the integrated model, calling for future studies to account for cultural, societal and generational variations to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying processes in order to guide future policy and programmatic directions.
Context and Implications
Rationale for this study: Education is often held up as the great equaliser, yet despite efforts over decades by governments to prioritise higher education as a tool to break the intergenerational inequality, we have seen limited success in educational opportunity driving reduction of the linkages between origins and outcomes.
Why the new findings matter: To effectively push forward our understanding of the systems change and policy interventions necessary to meaningfully move the needle in educational upward mobility will require a conceptual model that can effectively contend with the dynamic developmental nature of these processes in context.
Implications for researchers and policy makers: This critical review reveals the complicated, fluid nature of the role of education in upward mobility. Changing the inertia, or event backslide in upward mobility, will necessitate scholars and policy makers amplifying their collective agency by considering the dynamic transactions of individual differences, micro-relational dynamics, and macro-structures in their academic, practical and policy efforts toward addressing inequality. Through pushing our thinking on upward mobility toward a more developmentally informed model, our science will more fully elucidate the underlying complexity across levels of the ecology that either facilitate, or serve as barriers to, increasing opportunity and broadening the possibilities for all youth.
INTRODUCTION
Education is often held up as the great social equaliser for its potential to break the intergenerational transmission of disadvantages and bridge the gaps between social classes (Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2019b). For decades, governments from countries spanning the low- to high-income spectrum have prioritised higher education (HE) in their policy agendas as a solution to social inequality and a means to improve individual life chances and economic development, as indicated in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report (D'Addio, 2007). Despite these efforts, however, a rapid growth in the earnings disparity between full-time workers holding a bachelor's degree and those possessing only a high school diploma or less has been reported in the USA (Winters, 2020). This income gap is substantial, with the former earning more than twice that of the latter.
Educational upward mobility: Definition and current challenges
The phenomenon of individuals surpassing their parents' socioeconomic status (SES), as captured by income level or advancement in professional prestige (Kupfer, 2012), via HE, is called educational upward mobility (EUM). A society with greater EUM provides relatively equal opportunities and resources for individuals to develop and thrive regardless of circumstance of family of origin (Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2018). Strong EUM is believed to be associated with improved well-being and greater social sustainability, whereas a lack of EUM may yield negative individual and societal consequences such as unemployment, income inequality, poverty and vulnerability to criminal engagement (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, & Medicine [NASEM], 2019). Acknowledging the benefits of EUM and the effects of its absence, scholars from diverse disciplines (e.g., education, sociology, psychology, economics, and social work) have painstakingly investigated how to improve intergenerational mobility chances through educational access and attainment.
Despite collective efforts to mitigate inequality through HE, young people have increasingly confronted the everyday realities of heightened social stagnation: widening wealth gaps, growing educational disparities, excessive competition among graduates of undergraduate degrees for limited positions, and diminished EUM across the world (Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2019a; Shen & Lin, 2019).
In the USA, Belley and Lochner (2007) reported a renewed strengthening association between family of origin income and child college attainment, with higher wealth associated with greater college attendance. Altonji and Mansfield (2014) noticed the significant influence of school systems and associated neighbourhoods on the probabilities of high school graduation and college enrolment. At the same time, in the UK, educational attainment is evincing reduced predictive power for the achieved status among cohorts born since the mid-twentieth century (Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2019b; Goldthorpe, 2016; Jackson et al., 2005). Likewise, Shen and Lin (2019) pointed out the rigidity of intergenerational mobility in Taiwan by revealing significant wealth disparities among students from different tiers of HE institutions. Meanwhile, Mok (2016) found that rising HE enrolment driven by global competition in the Greater China region (i.e., Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Taipei) has not only failed to promote upward mobility but has paradoxically magnified asymmetries in educational opportunity and resources since the 2008 financial crisis. These emerging findings begin to call into question the durability of the strength and nature of relationship between HE attainment and EUM in recent cohorts of graduates.
Revisiting EUM theories: The OED triangle and its evidence-based critiques
Over the past few years, social divisions arising from the spread of Covid-19, economic crises and geopolitical conflicts have accentuated the impacts of inequality, making it imperative to revisit the theoretical basis of EUM and its inverse—the absence or diminishing evidence of EUM. In this sense, the sociological ‘OED triangle’ (Breen & Müller, 2020; Goldthorpe, 2014) (see Figure 1) represents one such seminal attempt to provide a succinct conceptual framework to disentangle underlying developmental mechanisms related to the extent to which education represents an equalising mediating pathway between family of origin and the achievement of EUM.
Encompassing the associations between ‘social Origin’, ‘Educational attainment’ and ‘social Destination’, the ‘OED triangle’ postulates that EUM can be fulfilled if education successfully mediates the relationship between origin and destination under three conditions (Goldthorpe, 2016): (1) reduced educational inequality due to educational reforms and expanded access (weakened O → E association, shown as dashed line), (2) increased returns to education prompted by employers hiring on the basis of formal education (strengthened E → D association, shown as a bold line), and (3) decreased or stabilised direct effects of origin on eventual destination (attenuated O → D association, shown as dashed line, Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2019a). However, small effect sizes, inconsistent and/or contrasting evidence for each association within the OED triangle strongly suggests that reading the OED as a functionalist hypothesis is inadequate (Goldthorpe, 2014). Notably, across the twentieth century, when evidence was emerging in the USA, the UK and some European countries of weakening of O-E linkages, it did not necessarily follow that E-D strengthened over time (Breen & Müller, 2020; Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2019a, 2019b; Devine & Li, 2013; Goldthorpe, 2016). In addition to inter-country and inter-regional differences, studies in Taiwan and China have also examined dynamics over time of O-E equalisation aligning with industrialisation movements (Breen & Jonsson, 2005; Guo, 2015; Hwang & Hwang, 2014; Mok, 2016). It is increasingly clear in the OED literature that, across time and place, treatment of education as the key determinant to social destination is limited in considering the dynamic ecologically embedded developmental pathways through which origin factors, apart from education, continue to impact one's developmental outcomes through complex reciprocal processes across domains.
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES AND METHODOLOGY
In an attempt to more fully capture these nuanced mechanisms and dynamic developmental processes involved in EUM and structural barriers to mobility, this article proposes an adapted model (see Figure 2) that includes the ongoing interactions/moderating effects of origin factors on education's impacts on destinations (E → D association), and of education on the strength of the link between one's origin and destination (O → D association), into the original mediation-based OED triangle.
Building on a Popper (1959) perspective, we have drawn on the limited and mixed evidence for linear effects in the original OED conceptualisation in our adaptation, and the result is a mediation-moderation model that will be itself testable and falsifiable in future work. Consideration of these more nuanced mechanisms and processes will reveal for whom and under what conditions these relationships are stronger or weaker, and better inform efforts to design and target macro interventions at structural inequalities and barriers disparately facing some in our communities.
Any theoretical model of EUM will, by definition, be a simplified approximation of what are multiply determined, complex processes. But, in order to have utility in guiding practice and policy efforts, any conceptual model must more fully account for the transactional developmental interplay (Sameroff & Mackenzie, 2003) between individual and context, and the structural and systemic barriers that continue to evince differential pay-off of educational attainment. Sameroff and colleagues in their edited volume on capturing transactional processes (Sameroff, 2009) have grappled with outlining some of the conditions and elements of testing such a dynamic model. They did not hide behind the Popper (1973) sense that the theory is not falsifiable and just a perspective and lay out clear processes for testing reciprocal processes (Gonzalez, 2009; MacKenzie & McDonough, 2009).
Therefore, the main objective of this article is to be critically constructive, and to build on the important contributions of the OED model (Breen & Müller, 2020; Goldthorpe, 2014), toward a theoretical and empirical justification for a new and testable theoretical model of EUM that more fully captures the interplay of developmental processes and structural inequalities. The model will be broken down pathway by pathway so that relevant literature can be infused, thereby deepening our understanding of the nature and strength of each construct and relationships between them.
Expanding the OED model: From mediation to mediation-moderation pathways
Studies derived from the original mediation-based OED triangle served an important role of explaining the ‘how and why’ of the operationalisation of EUM in the functionalist idealistic state, even as the condition of a meritocratic state was not met. In the first pathway, origin factors such as barriers and promoters across levels of an individual's ecology (e.g., SES and racial inequalities) predict education attainment (path O → E). In the second pathway, educational performance and attainment predict social destinations (path E → D); and, in the third pathway, we learn to what extent variance in one's destination is still a direct effect of origin (path O → D). Overall, the OED model examines the extent to which education plays a mediating role in the relationship between origin and destination (path O → E → D). Translated into practice, the theoretical model postulates that education would alter the destiny of children from lower SES backgrounds.
These questions embedded in the OED triangle are presented as blue arrow lines in our updated model in Figure 2. The OED-informed literature has highlighted the potential importance of ongoing interactions between O and E (e.g., Goldthorpe, 2014), and we seek to build on that call with a model adaptation designed to make explicit the need to measure the extent to which origin factors continue to play important roles in moderating the association between educational attainment and destination, and to what extent contemporary educational institutions and programmes can moderate the association between SES origin and destination, as shown by the addition of the purple arrow lines in Figure 2. In other words, the additional pathways in purple in the new model aim to answer the questions ‘for whom and in what circumstances’ are the associations of E → D and O → D stronger or weaker (Jaccard & Jacoby, 2019), and to increase the utility of the model for identifying potential ports of entry for intervention and informing the targeting and design of policies and programmes.
Adopting a critical theoretical analysis approach
For the purpose of model building, this article draws on the method of critical theoretical analysis (Grant & Booth, 2009) to review classical theories and seminal studies in social stratification/mobility. The purpose of a critical theoretical review is to present, analyse and synthesise cornerstone scholarship in the field of educational and social stratification, thereby laying the groundwork for a new hypothetical model (Grant & Booth, 2009). By critically evaluating the innovations, theoretical contributions, practical implications and limitations of the targeted literature, this article lays out a framework for a more nuanced and developmentally informed model of EUM mechanisms that will be used for further empirical verification.
The newly proposed model will build upon the original OED triangle's simplified mediation hypothesis to unpack the hidden intricacies among O, E and D, based on theoretical discourses and debates since the second half of last century. Notably, in our new model the constructs of O, E and D can be operationalised as different indicator variables, depending on which associations or developmental domains are under scrutiny, and which time points in development are being assessed. For example, E can be used to refer to ‘educational attainment’ as in the OED mediation triangle, or ‘type of educational institution’ or ‘federal/provincial educational policies’ in the moderation model of E → O-D.
A CRITICAL REVIEW TOWARD MODEL BUILDING
Using the new mediation-moderation OED theoretical model (Figure 2) as a map, this article critically delineates two areas of scholarship that help unpack the driving forces and crucial circumstances facilitating or hindering EUM: (1) the functionalist theorisation and critique of education's instrumental role in social mobility, and the rise of education-based meritocracy; and (2) Bourdieu's social reproduction theory (Bourdieu, 2018) on how family-inherited capital and habitus collude with educational institutions to perpetuate unequal class structures and power dynamics. From there, we propose our new EUM model by incorporating an ecological-transactional perspective to address the role of human agency in the dynamic and interactive processes of human development, focusing on how these processes are embedded in and influenced by children's social ecology.
The functionalist vision of EUM via OED full-mediation
The assumption underlying the ‘OED triangle’ hypothesis reflects the functionalists' utilitarian view of education in industrial and post-industrial societies (Parsons, 2008). Functionalism emphasises the interdependence of social systems and the processes that maintain social order through consensus among citizens. Education is therefore expected to reinforce social unity by providing structures, programmes and curricula that help citizens fulfil their social roles. Consequently, schooling—including HE—operates in the public interest with four major purposes (Cookson & Sadovnik, 2002): first, teaching basic skills and specific knowledge, as well as fostering higher-order thinking; second, inculcating citizens' allegiance and assimilation into a common political order; third, socialising individuals outside their families, promoting behaviours aligned with social norms; and fourth, selecting, training and allocating individuals into various occupational positions based on their merits. Accordingly, educational credentials and degrees are symbols of merit with economic functions.
This functionalist belief in HE aligns with the Human Capital Theory (HCT) in economics, which views HE institutions and their granted human capital (e.g., knowledge, skills, credentials) and social capital (e.g., social networks, Fuller, 2014) as positional goods with specific labour-market values (Sorensen, 1979). In this perspective, individuals are seen as rational actors who invest in education to increase production capacities, earnings and employment stability (Wahrenburg & Weldi, 2007). Likewise, public investment in HE is expected to stimulate economic growth through enhanced productivity and social stability (Goldthorpe, 2014). Both sociological functionalism and economic HCT hold positive utilitarian views on HE in relation to a strengthened E-D linkage.
Theoretical explanations for empirical inconsistency
Upward mobility has not necessarily increased as anticipated by functionalists across regions and historical periods. Higher education expansion has been a commonly adopted intervention by many societies to meet the rising demand for skilled workers in post-industrial societies since the end of World War II. According to the liberal democrats' ideal, broader access to HE should place more educated employees into labour markets (strengthening the E → D linkage) and weaken the O → E linkage. However, despite the anticipated reduction in class-related educational disparities (weakened O → E linkage), socioeconomic status (SES) returns on HE have declined after only one or two generations of increase. The E → D linkage varied across cohorts rather than continuing to strengthen.
Evidence includes the rapid rise in master's and professional degree credentials over the last two decades (Posselt & Grodsky, 2017), many of which have generated significant new revenue streams for universities (Bai, 2020). Some argue (Posselt & Grodsky, 2017) that this rise is partly a response to increased access to undergraduate education for individuals from lower-income families. Meanwhile, studies of the direct O → D linkage have not found consistent evidence for change (Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2019a; Goldthorpe, 2016).
As a result of these shifts, a revised version of the OED triangle (Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2019a, p. 93) was introduced, de-emphasising the relative strength of the mediating role of education as an equaliser to better reflect empirical findings of OED associations in recent decades. The contrasting evidence does not support an OED interpretation of the equalising effect of educational expansion on social mobility as fully mediating.
Over the past century, scholars have tried to disentangle the puzzle of the lack of strong equalising effects derived from educational reforms despite widening educational opportunities (weakened O → E and E → D association accompanied by unchanged O → D linkage). From a macro-historical perspective, sociologists and economists attributed the post-World War II EUM phenomena observed in many developed countries to the large-scale changes in occupational structure, which caused an ‘absolute upward mobility’ of an increasing proportion of the population toward the middle class (Breen & Müller, 2020).
However, the fulfilment of EUM relies on an increased ‘relative social mobility (also named “social fluidity”)’, often measured in the form of odds ratios in empirical research by the strength of the O → D association. Social fluidity may be a zero-sum game unless significant changes in class structure occur because the mobilisation process yields both upward and downward mobility simultaneously (Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2018).
On the institutional level, Hopper (1971) criticised the functionalists' failure to distinguish between the route and amount of education: the same number of years of schooling do not guarantee equal educational quality and SES rewards (Brand & Xie, 2010), and this is amplified across race in many racially-ethnically heterogeneous countries where disparities exist in the payoff from educational attainment across race that extend beyond SES disparities (Baum et al., 2022; Gaddis, 2015).
Sociologist Boudon (1974) alleged that enhanced HE participation does not necessarily promote EUM because the reduced disparities in educational opportunities may occur at the expense of enhanced competition at all attained educational levels and eventually flatten the labour-market value of undergraduate educational credentials and qualifications.
Early in the present century, Lucas (2001) proposed his ‘Effectively Maintained Inequality’ (EMI) theory, which foresaw parents from more privileged backgrounds, even in self-styled liberal progressive communities espousing values of public education, individually exploiting and collectively pushing for a qualitative differentiation of educational systems (e.g., private schooling, shadow education, tracking, specialised language-immersion programmes or gifted and talented programmes within schools, intersection of property-tax based school funding models with neighbourhood mobility/segregation, requiring internship and extra-curricular experiences with limited access under the guise of holistic admissions policies, postgraduate credential-inflation, etc.) when access to a given educational level becomes more evenly accessible.
The EMI hypothesis has received great empirical support from international studies, in Taiwan (Hwang & Hwang, 2014), in European countries (Jerrim, 2017), South Korea (Lee & Shouse, 2011), and Chile (Torche, 2005). In recent years, Goldthorpe (2016) accounted for the weakened E → D linkage by referring to the phenomenon of credential inflation and over-qualification of graduates. Credential inflation occurs because of the increasing supply of higher-educated workers outstripping demand in the labour market. Similarly, the over-qualification of graduate-level human resources offsets the labour-market value of all lower-level qualifications.
Even more recently, Bukodi and Goldthorpe (2018) invoked the ‘psychology of loss aversion’ to explain lack of evidence for full OED mediation, suggesting that human beings are more sensitive to losses than to gains, and thus are more concerned with avoiding social demotion than attaining promotion. Hence, individuals in more advantaged positions would, unsurprisingly, make greater efforts to resist, undermine and circumvent the equalising policies than individuals in less advantaged positions would make to utilise them.
Both EMI theory (Lucas, 2001) and the psychological mechanism of loss aversion explain the advantaged classes' self-preserving behaviours (Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2019b) and compensate for functionalism's limited macro-social focus by examining the micro-level cognition and transactional dynamics among individuals in the EUM processes. These two complementary theories thus address how social actors recognise and respond to the three postulated mediation OED requirements. The theoretical reasoning leads us to the long-standing issue of education-based meritocracy throughout the post-World War II era.
The education-based meritocracy (EBM) illusion
The idea of meritocracy supposes that people from all class positions can progress by virtue of their merits rather than their class origin or family background (Sandel, 2021). Merit can take the forms of one's educational qualifications (Bell, 1976) or their ability and motivation (i.e., IQ, perseverance, social–emotional competency) (Saunders, 1995, as cited in Themelis, 2008). The initial conception of meritocracy aligns with a functionalist OED vision that, in a truly equal-opportunity context, individuals from all social origins can be rewarded with occupations that correspond with their advancement in formal educational systems and labour markets.
Goldthorpe and Jackson (2007) capsulised this education-related meritocratic ideal as ‘education-based meritocracy’, which embodies a fully-mediated OED triangle by assuming two conditions: (1) selection in education and employment is based on ‘achievement’ rather than ascription (a weakened O → E linkage); and (2) the holders of more advanced educational qualifications should earn more (strengthened E → D linkage).
However, evidence worldwide indicates that ‘merit’ on its own has a limited impact on individuals' social destinations (Chuang & Chen, 2011; Guo & Wu, 2008; Themelis, 2008). In other words, the significance of educational attainment/qualification (‘merit’) is insufficient to secure better SES niches for individuals. Again, micro-level explanations of individual decision-making in given structures may help understand why EBM failed to bring equality and justice.
The notion of EBM is deeply rooted in the minds of today's elites (Markovits, 2019; Sandel, 2021). Early in the present century, Young (2001) warned of the meritocratic tendency to justify achievement through merit alone, thus fostering a strong sense of entitlement held by meritocrats. This internal attribution aligns with an undergirding logic that accumulating human capital (e.g., credentials, degrees, qualifications) is imperative for preserving privileges. Accordingly, upper- and middle-class parents work strategically and diligently to endow their children with the ‘know-how’ of success in an increasingly competitive social structure.
Meanwhile, the transformation of post-industrialised societies into knowledge-intensive economies justifies the constantly increasing societal demands on advanced education for career success (Lehmann, 2009) due to credential inflation and the overqualification of individuals with a postgraduate-level education. In recent years, critics of EBM like Markovits (2019) and Sandel (2021) have described the brutal repercussions of unduly expanded meritocracy as the ‘meritocracy trap’ and ‘tyranny of merit’. They argue that in an increasingly merit-based society, meritocrats would become renters, not owners, of their own human capital (i.e., they would extract profits, or income, from their existing capital by mixing it with their own labour), imprisoned in the endless labour-intensive circle of self-exploitation for production of more profit and higher SES status (e.g., from educational investment in training such as private tutoring, access to internships and extracurricular activity for resumé enhancement, to admission to an elite college, to securing an elite job, to achieving greater productivity and reputation).
As a result, it is not surprising that the current academic gap between the economically rich and poor in the USA has exceeded the gap between Blacks and Whites, and that contemporary middle-class youth with ordinary training have less chance to outperform their elite counterparts who now receive massive investments in education from early childhood (Chetty et al., 2014). In short, meritocracy has markedly aggravated the educational inequality between the upper, middle and lower classes (strengthened O → E linkage). Taken together, the consequences of education-based meritocracy, including middle-class stagnation, elite prosperity and rising SES divisions, have contributed to the re-confining of social mobility (increased or at least unchanged O → D linkage).
Unpacking the OED ideal using social reproduction theory
The effects of education-based meritocracy on social stagnation can be even more thoroughly unpacked by critically reviewing Bourdieu's seminal social reproduction theory.
Social reproduction and stratification in families and schools
Centred on the dialectic relationship between structure and agency, Bourdieu's thesis comprises four inextricable concepts: capital, habitus, field and practice (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Loveday, 2015). His theory proposes that the socialisation of individuals residing in different locations (i.e., one's position in society based on income, ethnicity, status, culture, etc.) depends heavily on their upbringing in their family of origin and cultural inheritance.
By definition, ‘capital’ refers to resources that one can utilise to gain social advantages in society. Bourdieu identifies three interconvertible forms of capital: (1) economic (commonly manifested as property), (2) social (membership in the gainful networks, comprised of ‘social obligations’ or ‘social connection’), and (3) cultural (precisely categorised into ‘internalized embodied cultural capital’ such as attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviours; ‘objectified cultural capital’ such as goods; and ‘institutionalized cultural capital’ such as credentials and accreditation).
For Bourdieu, ‘cultural capital’ is the principal mechanism behind the reproduction of inequality because it includes parental cultural codes and practices transmissible to children through family socialisation processes for securing returns (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). For example, parents of the upper or lower classes differ in knowledge, experience, skills and abilities to comprehend and intervene in the educational processes that can result in their children's educational payoff. In fact, parents with a college degree may help pave their children's path to college by sharing their own experiences of post-secondary preparation and study, and even assisting with college applications that require personal statements.
Bourdieu's related notion of ‘habitus’ denotes the internalised patterns of cultural capital (e.g., thoughts, tastes, behaviours and styles) and the long-standing system of ‘transposable dispositions’ (Bourdieu, 2020, p. 77) and ‘cognitive schemas of perception, conception, and action’ (Bourdieu, 2017, p. 43) formed via the implicit familial upbringing. Habitus not only determines what we experience as comfortable and natural (Lareau, 2011) but guides our practices (i.e., actions) in social spaces or ‘fields’, to use Bourdieu's terms (e.g., schools and workplaces, Bourdieu, 1990).
Bourdieu (1997, as cited in Walther, 2014) understands social fields as microcosms where individual agents and institutions interact in accordance with a set of tacit, field-specific rules that help shape our habitus and regulate our anticipation and our behavioural tendencies. In fact, Bourdieu theorised people's ‘practices’ (behavioural repertoire) as the products of their habitus and cultural capital interacting within the context of a given field.
For example, children from different socioeconomic locations demonstrate different preferences or tastes in food, clothing, means of transportation and entertainment, while following different implicit social rules and making choices based on different values. These differences are not merely individual choices but are determined by their access to certain economic, cultural and social capital and thereby function as markers of class.
Taken together, family-inherited cultural capital and habitus (named ‘family cultural endowment’ by Bourdieu, 2020), act as the mediator through which family backgrounds (parental SES) affect a child's educational performance and outcome, including HE participation (Whitty et al., 2015), as elucidated in Figure 3 (family cultural capital as the mediator on the O → D linkage, shown by the two bold lines in the figure).
For Bourdieu, the ‘field’ of educational systems does not facilitate social mobility by equally distributing opportunities to pupils. Instead, it legitimises the dominant structure of powerful groups over scarce resources (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Lareau, 2011), thus perpetuating existing power structures and dynamics with the help of institutional partiality for cultures belonging to the elite class. Bourdieu's thesis perceives mainstream institutionalised education as a moderator that consolidates the pre-existing O → D linkage (shown as the bold line O-D in Figure 4) and reinforces the unjust status quo.
For example, the materials and contents used to indoctrinate students in contemporary schooling mostly reflect the worldviews, values and tastes of the dominant groups. These cultural embodiments are disproportionately recognised by institutions, thereby granting distinction and privilege to those who possess and deploy them. Bourdieu also contends that teachers' biased criteria of assessment result in the rewarding of dominant culture-related competencies. These biased assessments reflect ‘class-based assumptions’ that prevail in educational systems and impact teachers' interpretation of students' abilities, successes and failures (Hunt & Seiver, 2018).
In other words, the family-inherited ‘cultural capital’ among the elite class function as vehicles for equipping individuals with knowledge of institutionalised high-status cultural signals/assets for the purpose of excluding others from advantaged social positions (Lamont & Lareau, 1988). These unequal biases manifest in the inevitable assimilation process (i.e., embourgeoisement) required for a student from a non-dominant background to succeed at school (Harker, 1984). Although working-class pupils must exchange their original habitus and family cultural capital for the desired educational capital, the high level of habitus-field congruence in middle- and upper-class students enables this group to retain their original habitus and cultural capital while acquiring new institutional credentials.
To conclude, in contrast to meritocratic beliefs, the social reproduction theory views individuals' social position as not the result of personal attributes or intrinsic merits, but a product of pervasive cultivation in privileged households where upper/middle-class child-rearing norms closely align with the standards upheld by academic institutions (Lareau, 2011).
Social stratification and reproduction outside families and schools: Theory and evidence
Bourdieu's thesis on social reproduction through differentiated cultural capital and habitus among classes applies to all social institutions. According to him, the impact of one's origin factors (e.g., parental SES) extends from families and schools into workplace settings. Counter to a conceptualisation of a fully mediated OED, Bourdieu argues that the possession of an academic credential, however prestigious, does not guarantee access to higher positions because the structure of distribution varies based on cultural, economic and political capital (Bourdieu, 2018). More specifically, a diploma-holder's socioeconomic privilege increases the value of their degree outside the academic market. In recent social stratification research, Forster et al. (2021) used ‘heterogenous returns on the investment to higher education’ to describe this unequal pay-off of education for social destination across social groups.
In short, Bourdieu (2018) and Forster et al. (2021) lead us to an essential yet less-addressed question: ‘How do the original factors across one's ecology continue to affect the socioeconomic and occupational outcomes of their HE?’ Mapping this question on our newly proposed model, we ask: What ecological factors in one's origin continue to moderate the SES returns on higher education and to what extent do these factors moderate this relationship (i.e., what moderation effect does O exercise on the E → D linkage, as shown in Figure 5)?
Continuing effect of SES on the return value of HE attainment
Several empirical studies support Bourdieu's observations that SES changes the value of post-secondary degrees, so that the same diploma can hold different economic capital for various graduates in the job market (Fiel, 2020; Zhou, 2019). Witteveen and Attewell (2017) revealed that low-SES graduates tend to make less than their more privileged counterparts, even while possessing the same human capital (e.g., GPA, degrees, majors) and occupying the same economic/occupational niches.
Additionally, privileged graduates have a better chance to secure higher-paying positions because their parents financially support them during the job-search period, and their inherited cultural capital (e.g., manners, appearance, cultural exposure) impresses employers with similar upbringing and tastes, a phenomenon called ‘homosocial reproduction’. Additional research finds a significantly smaller return on advanced degrees than on a bachelor's degree, as parental resources have greater influence for postgraduate degree holders with regard to school selectivity (i.e., expensive and financially rewarding institutions), field of study (i.e., lucrative ones such as law and medicine), age of completion and ultimate earnings (Oh & Kim, 2020; Torche, 2011).
Racial disparities on HE return
Not surprisingly, race and gender also play a salient role in shaping the returns on educational investment (Gaddis, 2015; Torche, 2018). In the United States, earning premiums associated with a college degree vary significantly among different racial and ethnic groups, with significantly higher premiums for white and Asian American full-time workers than for Black and Hispanic counterparts (Winters, 2020). Notably, Gaddis (2015) found that African American candidates with bachelor's degrees from elite universities typically receive lower-ranking job offers with smaller starting salaries than their white peers with similar, or even lower, educational level. Winters (2020) further reports that the average annual income of a white individual holding a bachelor's degree exceeds that of a Black counterpart by US$30,000.
Racial disparities persist even when considering advanced degree holders. For example, according to the 2019 US census, the median income for Black full-time employees with greater than a college degree is only 83% of the overall median among the 35- to 44-year-old cohort across ethnic groups, which is US$13,500 less than their white peers and US$30,600 less than their Asian counterparts (Baum et al., 2022).
Gender disparities on HE return
Although women have tended to outperform men in terms of educational achievement in recent decades, the gender wage gap has persisted among newly graduated individuals with the same level of education. Specifically, men with an associate, bachelor's or master's degree tend to earn significantly higher wages than their similarly educated female counterparts (Tzanakis, 2011).
This wage disparity can be attributed to various factors, including occupational demand and cumulative disadvantage (Smith & Waite, 2019) as well as the attainment of advanced degrees and the choice of fields of bachelor's studies (Quadlin et al., 2023). Due to gender and racial stereotypes, women are often over-represented in low-demand fields, which further contributes to lower earnings and a larger wage gap (AAUW, 2012a, 2012b; Smith & Waite, 2019).
Intersectional disparities on HE return
Interestingly, studies have shown that male PhD holders of colour and male bachelor's degree holders from elite institutions experience greater income differentiation than their female peers (Torche, 2018). Although women still encounter discrimination, their average income level is less than men's, even among those with the highest levels of education.
Hence, the intersectional disparate associations (Codiroli Mcmaster & Cook, 2019) between identity characteristics, such as, but not limited to, race, gender, disability (Blanchett et al., 2009; McCauley, 2020; Montez et al., 2017; Sentenac et al., 2019), sexuality (Mollborn & Everett, 2015), or immigration status (Crosnoe & Turley, 2011; Harris et al., 2008), and educational investment and return-on-investment are complex and nuanced, and a range of factors influence outcomes.
Critiques of social reproduction theory
Despite its wide applications and longstanding impacts, Bourdieu's theory is not immune to criticism. Most critiques fall into the following categories: conflictual evidence regarding the influence of cultural capital and teacher biases, empirical differences found across cultural contexts, and the role of agency in the unjust structures.
Contradictory empirical evidence
One of the theory's major weaknesses is the inconclusiveness about the effect of family-based cultural capital on academic performance in quantitative research (Tzanakis, 2011). If Bourdieu's proposition is valid, family cultural endowments would have a mediating effect on the relationship between parental SES and children's educational outcomes. To date, empirical efforts to test this proposition have generated conflicting and inconsistent results.
On the one hand, a growing body of literature has shown that various indicators of cultural capital (i.e., parental engagement in cultural activities with the child) have independent effects on educational outcomes when controlling for SES and family background variables (e.g., DiMaggio, 1982; Sullivan, 2001). Other literature, however, has refuted Bourdieu's assertion, finding weak or problematically significant associations between parental or family cultural capital and children's educational achievements (e.g., Katsillis & Rubinson, 1990) in Greece, (Robinson & Garnier, 1985) in France, Dumais (2002, 2006) in the USA, van de Werfhorst (2010) in the Netherlands, Irwin (2009) in England, and Hsieh and Chuang (2016) in Taiwan.
Meanwhile, large-scale longitudinal studies (e.g., De Graaf & Kalmijn, 2001) reported weak or modest effects of cultural capital on student grades and educational ambitions. Likewise, Noble and Davies's (2009) cross-sectional study obtained ungeneralisable significant results due to small, non-representative samples.
Overall, empirical research grounded in Bourdieu's theory has revealed contradictory findings mainly due to two reasons. First, research differs in sampling (i.e., use of different datasets and/or populations) and in methods (i.e., using different statistical models) as well as how cultural capital is operationalised (Tan, 2017; Vryonides, 2007) (i.e., using different indicators to measure the construct of cultural capital, such as parental engagement in children's school activities, time spent with children on academic/cultural activities, children's preference/tendency to pan-cultural activities) and academic outcomes (i.e., GPA, high school graduation rate, reading or math scores or both etc.).
Second, empirical models for the relationship between cultural capital and outcomes fail to accommodate the theoretical complexity of Bourdieu's theory (Kingston, 2001). In other words, Bourdieu's thesis encapsulates very complicated mechanisms, among a set of interconnected yet fluidly defined constructs that are descriptive and discursive in nature, and, as a result, are not easily transformed into a causal relational model using measurable variables.
Cultural contextual differences
Moreover, contextual difference is another crucial factor that challenges the generalisability and applicability of the social reproduction theory in non-European populations and societies. Numerous quantitative and qualitative studies have demonstrated a shortage of empirical evidence in support of Bourdieu's theory in minoritised groups in the USA and the UK (e.g., Driessen, 2001; Tzanakis, 2011).
For example, Bourdieu's definition of cultural capital as highbrow cultural engagement seems irrelevant to some ethnic minorities as it is race (not class) that distinguishes hierarchies of cultural value (Devine-Eller, 2005). Similarly, Li et al. (2008) argued that in the UK educational achievement differentials between ethnic groups are a function of financial, human and social capital, rather than simply a product of cultural capital, implying that inequalities in social capital are more accountable for social stratification between ethnic groups (Lareau & Horvat, 1999).
Additionally, Bourdieu's allegations against educational institutions and teachers for endorsing uneven class dynamics also fail to find adequate evidence in empirical studies (Tzanakis, 2011). For example, Farkas et al. (1990) and Sullivan (2001) found that teachers evaluated students not only based on their cognition, scholastic aptitudes and performances, but also on attitudes, work habits and communicative skills that are not necessarily upper-class oriented. In addition, Van De Werfhorst and Hofstede (2007) suggested that there is a minimal impact of parental cultural capital on children's performance, despite its mediating effect on the relationship between parental social class and their children's secondary school type.
Finally, Bourdieu's hypothesis regarding the arbitrary criteria imposed by school systems for student assessment was not supported in studies in France (Robinson & Garnier, 1985), the USA (Broderick and Hubbart, 2000, as cited in Kingston, 2001), the UK (Goldthorpe & Jackson, 2007; Sullivan, 2001), Greece (Katsillis & Rubinson, 1990), or the Netherlands (Driessen, 2001).
Underemphasis of the role of ‘agency’ in reforming habitus
Scholars have also raised criticisms about academia's overemphasis on the ‘structure’ aspect of Bourdieu's continually reworked theoretical dialectics while overlooking the ‘agency’ component (e.g., Reay, 2004). This bias has resulted in criticism of Bourdieu's discourse as latent determinism, rendering individuals as passive products of their surroundings.
Lareau (2011) and Horvat (Lareau & Horvat, 1999), however, clarified that the process of social reproduction is not a smooth and linear trajectory based on individual characteristics seamlessly transmitted across generations. Bourdieu's later works likewise challenge the simplified view of ‘habitus’ as a form of reductionist determinism by appraising it as a set of simultaneously constraining and transformative dispositions, potentially changed by intentional historical actions through awareness and pedagogic effort (Bourdieu, 2017; Bourdieu et al., 1999).
In other words, class of origin has an impact on social reproduction, but does not determine our fate because habitus self-reproduces in a relatively unpredictable way that allows for individual agency within the limits inherent in its original structure (Reay, 2004). To illustrate the dynamic nature of Bourdieu's theory, Lareau and Horvat (1999) observed parents of Black and white families in the same school, indicating that cultural capital itself has no inherent value but only functions in relation to specific fields, and individuals vary in their ability and skills to activate it.
In an early work that examined cultural participation and high schoolers' grades, DiMaggio (1982) proposed the ‘cultural mobility model’ (as an alternative to the ‘cultural capital model’), where cultural capital seemed to exert greater impact on the grades of less advantaged male youth, for whom the acquisition and display of prestigious cultural resources may mobilise class ascent. Similarly, according to Roksa and Kinsley's (2019) recent study on the relationship between parent–child discussions about school (operationalised cultural capital) and the transition into HE (operationalised educational outcome), students from less advantaged families benefit more from the academic-related discussion than their privileged counterparts when situated in schools with a high college-going culture. Moreover, using the example of the successful ‘YouthBuild’ holistic programme for school dropouts, Horvat and Davis (2011) concluded that habitus alteration was possible and conducive to changes in social class trajectories.
In sum, Bourdieu's social reproduction theory corroborates the long-standing sociological dialectics between structure and agency by exposing the confrontational coexistence of possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities, and opportunities and constraints inscribed in people's objective conditions and histories.
In dialogue with the ecological-transactional model of human development
As can be gleaned from the sections above, there exist many linkages between the perspectives of Boudon, Lucas, Bourdieu and meritocracy scholars, in their grappling with the issue of the reproduction of inequality. They all examine the paradoxical role that education was used as a tool for either social advancement or a mechanism that reinforces existing inequalities, depending on various factors within the socio-economic structure that serve the reproduction of inequality, with foci that span the micro–macro spectrum.
While Boudon and Lucas successively addressed the disappointing outcome of HE in expansion/weakening O-E – perpetuation of inequality – meritocracy scholars and Bourdieu delved into the elites' self-preserving mentality, which underpins their tendency to consolidate existing power structure, linking the macro-level phenomenon with micro-level psychology.
Specifically, Bourdieu provides an analytical apparatus to unpack the operation of power in our daily practices by jointing the micro-individual (i.e., cultural capital and habitus) to the macro-structural (i.e., field) in an attempt to reconcile the agency-structure dualism (Walther, 2014). However, his generic framework (Turner & Turner, 1978) and vaguely defined theoretical constructs offer no cohesive theory to illuminate the resolution of educational inequality and leaves a considerable gap in the practical ‘know-how’ of human agency and developmental processes (Kingston, 2001).
The current analysis aims to address this limitation by integrating the ecological (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1986) and transactional frameworks (Sameroff & Chandler, 1975; Sameroff & MacKenzie, 2003) of human development into our comprehension of EUM. The ecological-transactional perspective views child development, including EUM, as an ongoing, dialectical, transactional and dynamic process embedded in the interacting subsystems of children's' social ecology (see Figure 6). These dynamics encompass the underlying transactional processes between individuals and their environments, and the intertwined dialectic between children's intrinsic properties (nature) and extrinsic experiences (nurture).
Within the area denoting the ‘individual’, the violet circles represent the biological (e.g., neurophysiology, neuroendocrinology, proteomics, epigenomics, proteomics, etc.) and psychological (e.g., cognitive capacities, mental health, persistence, social competence, etc.) characteristics of the developing child. The layering of additional micro-systems across developmental stages symbolises the growing complexity and interconnectedness of the child's immediate experiential contexts and their enhanced self-regulation capacity as they mature (Sameroff, 2010), which can be understood as the sophistication of habitus in Bourdieu's terms.
The intricate interplay of the child's proximal micro-systems is underpinned by Coleman's seminal works in OED scholarship (1966, 1987). His studies underscore the neutral role of school in closing achievement gaps while highlighting the substantial impact of family and community-based social capital. This social capital, encompassing norms, social networks, and adult-child relationships, plays a crucial role in enabling children to derive benefits from institutional educational interventions like formal schooling.
The bidirectional circular arrows vertically penetrating the circles separating the various nested ecological systems demonstrate the continuous transactional forces between individuals and their environments, including macro structural and systemic forces. These are weighted more heavily in the downward direction, to reflect that while individuals can certainly effect change on the more macro systems in which they are embedded, those more distal macro forces have greater effects on shaping individual development and educational opportunity.
Within this ecological transactional view, EUM is seen as reciprocal and time-bound connections among individuals' characteristics and social identities at a point in time, the constantly changing educational systems that feed into their experiences, and their provisional social destinations across the lifespan. Both Bourdieu and developmentalists like Sameroff and colleagues (Sameroff & Chandler, 1975; Sameroff & Mackenzie, 2003), Vygotskiĭ & Cole (1978), and educational scholars including Dewey and Bentley (1949), have grappled with, and emphasised, the dialectic transactional processes between human agency and external structure/context. Their theories articulate similar ideas through different terms. For example, Bourdieu's belief in the constantly generative influence of habitus in individual histories parallels the dynamic nature of human development in Sameroff (2009); the Bordieuan concept of ‘social field’ resembles what Sameroff calls ‘subsystems’ in a child's social ecology.
However, transactional scholars (MacKenzie & McDonough, 2009; Sameroff, 2010; Sameroff & Mackenzie, 2003) consider both the biological and psychological dimensions when discussing the leverage of individual characteristics, which Bourdieu abstracts as ‘habitus’ (a complicated hybrid of cognition, affection, attitudes and behaviours) and fails to clearly distinguish among them. Additionally, by drawing on the Chinese Taoist Yin-Yang dialectics, Sameroff (2010) delineated the unity and interpenetration of individual agency and exterior surroundings in a circular dialectical progression: one's agency invokes actions that shape the external world, and in turn, the changing world proceeds to reconfigure the individuals residing in the structure.
On the other hand, the crux of social reproduction theory rests in the matter of power and structural barriers, which psychology and economics have tended to not sufficiently grapple with in their investigation of human behavioural trajectories. For instance, while Bourdieu views the social field as a ‘locus of power struggles’ that represent a network of dominant and dominated positions (Bourdieu, 1975, p. 19), ecological system theorists are merely oriented to describe and explain the equilibrium and mechanisms of the present social systems (Elliott & Davis, 2020).
Adding the ecological-transactional theory to the proposed model, the present paper asserts that the ‘origin’ component of the OED triangle should be understood and operationalised developmentally by involving not only one's original ecology and social identities (e.g., sex, ethnicity, nationality, etc.) but also their physiological and psychological propensities. Furthermore, that which counts as ‘origin’ also changes over time, thereby constituting different starting points from a temporal perspective.
In short, a more comprehensive apprehension of EUM requires an understanding of all three OED pivots (i.e., individual origins, educational systems and socioeconomic structures of destination) as developmental processes, with increased attention paid to the transactions and linkages among them. The transactional perspective captured in Figure 6, pushes us to recognise that the Origin factors in the original OED do not linearly predict E or D. Instead, both the individual and their more proximal microsystem factors that have tended to be captured in ‘O’ develop over time. While there is certainly stability and continuity to be found in human development, this model better allows for the discontinuities and qualitative shifts that can occur across time.
This conceptual framework allows for the scaffolding of domain-specific theories and methodologies as components of these processes are tested across studies over time. It also provides a conceptual framework to more carefully consider the ways in which the ‘E’, or education, in OED is operationalised and experienced across development. Like ‘O’ and ‘D’ factors, ‘E’ has multiple layers and can be situated within and across an individual's ecology across time.
Our longitudinal investigations of EUM must begin to more fully grapple with how we may have to capture origin and education constructs in different ways at different points in development (e.g., self-regulatory capacity captured with temperament measures in early childhood might be more appropriately measured by different tasks or metrics in middle-childhood or adolescence), and at different levels of the ecology (e.g., while we might measure GPA, test scores or attendance at an individual level, metrics for education at the exo-systems level might include indicators of school segregation metrics, curricular rigour or school quality, whereas at the macro-systems level we might turn to indicators of school-funding equity).
From a transactional perspective, we should also continue to consider whether our review of our indicators is keeping pace with growing awareness and evidence of how these developmental constructs operate and be ever-vigilant that efforts at parsimony through utilisation of proxy variables may be taking us too far from the actual developmental experiences unfolding.
For example, is Race or Gender what we are wanting to capture in a particular study, or are they serving as a sloppy proxy for racialised or gendered experiences within the structures of our ecology? If what we really want to be capturing is the environment's disparate and inequitable reactions to these localities/identities, then we should be making a greater effort to measure experienced structural racism, not race, experienced gender(s)/sex bias not gender, and onward.
In other words, simply because there are more easily measured pieces of a particular identity that show up at the individual level, we run the risk that utilising those proxies simply masks, and in so doing preserves, the real action that is playing out at the micro-, exo- and macro-systems levels. To the extent that those factors also moderate inequities in the return on investment of education we do a great disservice by not pushing forward our efforts to better capture and reflect those structural forces in our inquiry.
DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS AND LIMITATIONS
A new quantitative mediation-moderation EUM model emerges from our critical analysis of two clusters of classical scholarship: the functionalist idealistic OED triangle and the critical social reproduction theory of Bourdieu. Supplementally, we drew on the ecological transactional model of human development to fortify and enrich our discourses around human agency, as a dynamic counterbalance to the structural staticity implied in both OED and Bourdieu's theses. These transactional perspectives underscore the need to generate and use more fine-grained longitudinal data and to move beyond attempts to capture O-E-D as a static linear representation of just three discrete points in time.
This critical review reveals the complicated, fluid nature of EUM, with several implications. First, our analysis sheds light on the crucial yet paradoxical role of human agency in undermining the functionalist OED ideal (achieving EUM) and transcends the deterministic cycle of social reproduction. To uncover the mechanisms of human agency in transforming structures, our analysis indicates a need for scholastic junctures where macro-level problem-framing (e.g., functionalism, social reproduction theories) and micro-level solution building can meet. Standing on previous theoretical and empirical dialogues revolving around the OED, we need to progress further toward an inquiry about ‘how to facilitate EUM’ or ‘what ecological factors enable EUM in given ecological contexts’. Future studies should thus aim to integrate macro/distal (e.g., historical, economic and social structures, systemic exclusion, and structural racism and disparities), micro/immediate (e.g., family, school, community, relational), and individual (e.g., IQ, temperament, persistence, socio-emotional functioning) factors into problem conceptualisation, intervention development and policy reforms.
We are a long way, even in high-income countries, from EUM no longer being a critical indicator of efforts to create more level access to opportunity in education and later career paths across generations. In a future where access to quality educational paths come without systemic structural barriers, however, we must also begin conversations around how we think about intergenerational education and opportunity and whether progress in upward mobility can be perpetual, or if other foci become key. At such a point, we may need indicators of maintenance of equity in opportunity that capture the extent to which people have the full array of paths available to them allowing them to choose the ones that offer the best individual fit.
Scholars, educators and policy makers should also seek ways to amplify our collective agency in changing the status quo by considering the dynamic transactions between individual differences (biology), micro-relational dynamics (psychology) and macro-structures (sociology) in our academic, practical, economic and political endorsement of EUM. For example, intervening in the larger economic and political structures is imperative because the national GDP and stage of economic development strongly influence how fluid a society can be (Bukodi & Goldthorpe, 2019a; Gerber, 2003). Meanwhile, recognition of local contextual, relational nuances is helpful to inform the identification of potential ports of entry into these complex systems for the targeting and development of appropriate interventions (Chetty et al., 2014; Hwang & Chen, 2013; Luoh, 2002, 2018).
Our review also demonstrates that the advancement of EUM involves ongoing, multi-system endeavours across the ecology of youths over the course of their lives. We should address EUM from an interdisciplinary developmental perspective. In this vein, we view HE as a transitional pivot toward the fulfilment of long-term socioeconomic equity and well-being, rather than simply a marker of successful EUM. Policies and interventions for educational equity should take further steps to investigate what promotes equitable socioeconomic and psychological outcomes of HE (Banerjee et al., 2023). Such a transactional model will help dissuade us from thinking that policy or programmatic prescriptions that address only one or a few factors in these systems will be a cure-all for what are multiply determined processes that are examples of both equifinality (i.e., multiple paths to the same endpoint) and multifinality (i.e., from any one starting point multiple destinations are possible). In addition to the prevailing concerns about equalising educational access and resources, it is no less urgent to bridge the gaps in the dividends of educational investment that still segregate the privileged and underprivileged.
Our integrated model has methodological, theoretical and contextual limitations. The multidisciplinary theories that it incorporates to unpack the interplay of education and social stratification/mobility can be challenging to reconcile. Each theory differs in its scope, level of abstraction, context of investigation and purpose. Accordingly, the constructs of origin, education and destination in the integrated model do not possess unified definitions; rather, they are used as theoretical terms that encompass fluctuating denotations depending on the research context. Future studies drawing on the current model need to be specific about which pathways and variables to examine.
Moreover, the theories included in our review are all rooted in contemporary Euro-American contexts. We do not detail the sociocultural differences and nuances cross-nationally or explore the extent to which these theories apply to non-Western contexts such as the Global South. The model can broadly inform developmental and ecological processes that cut across cultures, but potential specific practice and policy solutions must account for local distinctions that shape people's social conditions and delimit their possibilities for educational and occupational development. Given the interdisciplinary nature of EUM as a societal, political, economic and historical field of inquiry, future studies should carefully consider variations across cultures, societies and generations.
Conclusion
If the ladder of educational opportunity rises high at the door of some youth and scarcely rises at the door of others, while at the same time formal education is made a prerequisite to occupational and social advance, then education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them. (As quoted in NASEM, 2019, pp 1–2)
What the Commission showed great foresight in correctly identifying then, and what the NASEM Committee on Educational Equity underscored once more over seven decades later, was the concerted efforts that can arise across levels of the ecology to preserve social and class hierarchies in the face of policy efforts aimed at broadening the educational opportunity structure.
Through pushing our thinking on Educational Upward Mobility toward a more developmentally informed transactional model, it is hoped our science will be better positioned to more fully capture and elucidate the underlying complexity across levels of the ecology that either facilitate or serve as barriers to increasing opportunity and broadening the possibilities for all youth to choose the path that is right for them. Recent history suggests that efforts aimed at enshrining advantage for some threaten not just access to quality education, but the evenness of the payoff of those educational opportunities across a host of outcome dimensions. Policies to address these shifts will necessitate models that are developmentally informed and sufficiently nuanced to guide the capturing of these dynamic effects.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Yunung Lee: Conceptualization; writing – original draft; formal analysis; writing – review and editing; funding acquisition; investigation; methodology; data curation; project administration; visualization; validation. Michael J. Mackenzie: Visualization; conceptualization; writing – review and editing; funding acquisition; supervision; methodology; resources. Lucyna Lach: Writing – review and editing; validation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The first author was supported by doctoral funding from the Taiwan Ministry of Education and Société et culture – Fonds de recherche du Québec. The research was also undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program to the second author, as well as the support of a William T. Grant Foundation Faculty Scholar Award.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT
The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.
ETHICS STATEMENT
This review article is based on a synthesis of existing literature. It did not involve empirical data collection, human participants, or the use of personal data, thus formal ethical approval was not required.
Open Research
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
