Occupational Status, Education, and Social Mobility in the Meritocracy

in the Meritocracy ABSTRACT Following a brief review of the concept of occupational status, we review trends in Next, we examine trends and differentials in the effects of family origins, measured social background, and schooling on occupational standing. Finally, using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), we explore relationships among social background, measured mental ability, and occupational status in youth and adulthood. In this paper, we use indexes of the socioeconomic standing of occupations to measure trends and differentials in intergenerational social mobility and in the effects of social background, educational attainment, and measured mental ability on occupational standing. We begin with an overview of the measurement of occupational status. This concept may be unfamiliar to some readers, and comparability among later findings depends on some of the details of index construction. We turn next to an examination of trends in aggregate intergenerational mobility, trends in occupational social standing, and trends in the effects of social background and educational attainment on occupational standing. In these analyses, we use several sets of national survey data that contain appropriate measurements: Research Center (GSS). These surveys are each sufficiently large to permit some level of disaggregation by race, age, and sex, but only one of them, the GSS, contains even a crude, direct measure of mental ability. Thus, there is a tradeoff between national and temporal scope, on the one hand, and examination of the role of mental ability in the stratification process. Finally, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey (WLS), we focus on the role of measured mental ability in occupational standing. The NLSY is a high-quality national survey, but its population coverage is limited to cohorts aged 14 to 21 in 1979, who have been followed through 1993. The WLS is a regional sample of men and women who have been followed from their high school graduation in 1957 to ages 53 and 54 in 1992-93. Socioeconomic Status Socioeconomic status is typically used as a shorthand expression for variables that characterize the placement of persons, families, households, census tracts, or other aggregates with respect to the capacity to create or consume goods that are valued in our society. Thus, Hauser and Warren (1996) have comprehensively reviewed the history and methodology 2 of occupational status measurement in the U.S. 2 socioeconomic status may …