Higher Education and Social Mobility: Evidence and Policy

Tutorial 1 — Intergenerational Mobility

The course opens by defining intergenerational mobility and examining how it relates to education policy. Students explore how family background relates to children’s earnings in adulthood and how higher education has expanded in England in the last decades (Britton, Drayton, and van der Erve, 2021; Farquharson, McNally and Tahir, 2024). Students practise interpreting data visualisations and identifying the key channels through which higher education may shape mobility. For their first assignment, students draft a “Call for Evidence” commissioning a policy report on how higher education shapes social mobility in England.

Tutorial 2 — Access to University

This tutorial turns to the input side of the mobility equation: who goes where? Students analyse how the representation of students from different socioeconomic backgrounds varies across universities of differing selectivity, drawing on evidence from Britton, Drayton and van der Erve (2021). A central question is whether access and selectivity gaps can be fully rationalised by differences in prior school achievement, or whether they persist even among students with comparable grades, as shown by Campbell et al. (2022). The homework asks students to interpret a data visualisation from the tutorial and discuss what the evidence implies for policy.

Tutorial 3 — Graduate Earnings and Inequalities

The focus shifts to the output side: how do earnings outcomes vary by university attendance, university type and student background? Students examine the graduate wage premium and learn how success rates—the probability that students from low-income families reach the top of the earnings distribution—differ across institutions, building on Britton, Drayton and van der Erve (2021) and Farquharson, McNally and Tahir (2024). The tutorial introduces the distinction between correlation and causation, setting the stage for Tutorial 4. In their homework, students are presented with fictional student profiles and asked to identify the fairest comparisons for isolating the causal effect of a university.

Tutorial 4 — Do Universities Change Lives? Causal Effects

This tutorial asks what share of the observed variation in graduate earnings across universities reflects genuine causal effects rather than selection. Students learn about selection bias, and natural experiments as tools for credible causal inference. They then engage with evidence from Belfield et al. (2021), who estimate returns to different degrees by comparing similar students attending different institutions. A key finding is that selectivity is only weakly related to returns across most of the distribution, but strongly so at the top. For homework, students reflect on the policy implications: can greater access to selective universities meaningfully boost social mobility?

Tutorial 5 — Academic and Policy Writing

Students learn the key principles of writing for academic and policy audiences. They are walked through and discuss practical, reference examples of how sections, paragraphs and sentences can be structured. In addition, the tutorial covers guidelines on finding, evaluating and using sources.

Tutorials 6 and 7 — Final Assignment

At the end of the course, students write a report to the Department for Education, analysing how higher education shapes social mobility in England. They receive one-to-one feedback on their draft report in tutorial 6, and on their final submission in tutorial 7.