BIAS IN BUSINESS EDUCATION
Job prospects of disadvantaged graduates in the UK are often adversely affected by their socio-economic circumstances. Richard Galletly examines how schools can redress the balance T he Sutton Trust report, Elitist Britain 2019 , describes the UK as an “increasingly divided nation”; in fact, it found that society is divided into different sections, each with a profound misunderstanding of the challenges faced by others. Social divisions persist, with the privately educated finding their way more easily into top jobs. Furthermore, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) notes that parental income and wealth is of ever- growing importance in determining lifetime salaries in British society. In a 2023 report, IFS argues that education inequalities are the dominant factors for the persistent differences between education outcomes and earnings, with wealthier Britons also receiving larger inter-generational financial transfers consisting of both gifts and inheritances. According to the Sutton Trust report, these divisions extend to British universities and have a persistent impact on graduate employability. At university, as in other life situations, working- class students find themselves at a disadvantage. Their prospects and experiences are fixed due to their socio-economic origins. A 2017 paper led by University College London (UCL) sociology professor Alice Sullivan observed that the rich perpetuate these inequalities through the ‘social reproduction’ of both economic and educational gains. The benefits of wealth have been passed on to the children of the rich throughout history via the British education system and other mechanisms of social reproduction, in which parents transfer their socio‑economic advantages and disadvantages. Hence, wealthier graduates benefit from substantially better employment opportunities. The education system plays a powerful role in the transfer of these factors. Social origins and destinations are connected through the influence
of social networks, moreover inequalities are maintained post-graduation due to a restricted access to the next level. This inequality of access might explain why education works for some, but not others. Graduate employability, the next level of inequality, is perpetuated through unequal access to employment opportunities. In a 2024 interview for the Financial Times , MIT Sloan School of Management assistant professor Anna Stansbury argued that there are a combination of factors that influence the access that graduates have to these opportunities, including their parents’ education, tacit knowledge about how education works, understanding of the mechanisms and pathways to elite graduate careers, plus the social status required to join certain groups. Each of these elements disadvantage working-class graduates when they compete with graduates from wealthier families. An opportunity for change Despite this, over the past 25 years there has been a substantial increase in the percentage of young people entering UK higher education, with 50 per cent going to university in 2017, according to a 2024 Sutton Trust report. Entitled Social Mobility and Opportunity: What the Public Thinks , it identified that socio-economic class continues to influence the university attainment of British graduates. Without some form of intervention, universities will continue to play their role in the persistent mechanisms of social inequality common in the UK. Although universities have not always been champions of genuine social change, today they have the opportunity to lead it, as Cambridge University vice-chancellor Stephen Toope declared in a 2019 seminar. It should be reasonably expected that young people who graduate will become more socially mobile – and universities can be engines for this. Not all education is beneficial to all students from all backgrounds in the same way; in fact, there are considerable differences based on the degree subject studied. The aforementioned 2017 paper from UCL’s Sullivan found that the choice of degree may have a greater influence on post-graduation opportunities, rather than the status of the university. If this is so, then coaching a prospective student to select the most appropriate subject according to their socio- economic group could make a large difference to their employability and salary expectations.
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Business Impact • ISSUE 1 • 2025
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