Intergenerational mobility into doctoral education across Europe

Abstract

Despite increasing concerns over socioeconomic barriers in access to doctoral education, relatively little is known about the degree to which PhDs are selected in terms of their social background. In this paper, we use combined data on over 200,000 individuals from the European Social Survey, the European Values Study, and the World Values Survey to estimate the strength of the relationship between parental education and child PhD attainment within 26 European countries. We find that intergenerational mobility into PhD degrees is somewhat higher in the Nordic countries, and somewhat lower in the Eastern European countries in our sample, but also that mobility is generally high, that PhDs are socioeconomically diverse, and that mobility differences between the countries in our sample are generally small.