Degrees remain a middle class aspiration

Researchers have revealed that it is middle classes who have benefited more in the last 15 years from the expansion of higher education, with just a five per cent increase in degrees among children of working-class parents.

Their study also suggested that students with parents in professions such as teachers, nurses and civil servants are fuelling the rise in people going to university.

The Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) analysed the social backgrounds of almost 34,000 adults aged between 22 to 34 and 37 to 49.

The younger group would have gone to university after higher education expanded in 1992, obtaining their first degrees between 1996 and 2009.

The older group would have gone to university before 1992.

The findings show that among the 37 to 49-year-olds, just over a quarter had degrees.

This rose to more than a third – 34.3 per cent – for those aged between 22 to 34-years-old.

Researchers found a difference in the size of this increase when they looked at students’ “socio-economic” backgrounds.

The study found that among those whose parents had “managerial and professional” jobs when they were 14 years old there was a 10 per cent difference in the numbers gaining degrees between the two age groups.

However for those whose parents had “routine or manual” jobs the rise was only five per cent.

The researchers also concluded that the major increase in people going to university in recent years was largely down to rising numbers of students with parents holding white-collar jobs.

Report co-author Professor Peter Elias of Warwick University said; “Higher education has been unable to bridge a cultural divide between parents who feel it’s not relevant and not something they want their child to get into, versus groups where there’s been a real pick up in interest – the middle class, white-collar workers.

People, particularly parents, who are in jobs where they can see if they want them to get in, they’re going to have to have a degree.”