White Working-Class Boys Becoming An Underclass (UK)

White teenagers are less likely to go to university than school-leavers from other ethnic groups - even with the same A-level results, according to official figures.

The gap is widest among male teenagers from poor backgrounds, raising fresh fears that working class boys are becoming the education "underclass" in England.

According to a Government report, just over one-in-20 white boys from poor homes goes on to university.

This compares to 66 per cent of Indian girls and 65 per cent of young women from Chinese families.

An analysis published by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills said the rise in the number of women going to university over the last 10 or 20 years "had made the performance of males look relatively dismal".

The report said many working class white boys dropped out of education at the earliest opportunity, aged 16.

Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, said schools needed to intervene at an earlier age to get white boys interested in college and university.

"I think that culture plays a very important role," he said. "Part of what we have to do is to look across society and look among the ethnic minority groups where there is a very strong attachment to education and try to learn from that."

An analysis carried out by the DIUS looked at the number of teenagers going on to university, broken down by gender, ethnicity, social class and achievement at school.

It found that women were in the minority at university up to 1992, but over the last 15 years the balance had shifted.

Last year the proportion of young men studying for a degree fell to 35 per cent, compared to 47 per cent of women.

Despite fears that women are much more likely to go to university, the report said ethnicity and social class had a "larger" bearing on staying on rates.

The gaps "did not disappear entirely" even when comparing students with the same A-level results, researchers said.

"In fact, in the case of ethnicity, it was overwhelmingly clear the young people from non-white backgrounds were much more likely to participate in higher education than their white peers with similar prior attainment," said the study.

Just six per cent of white boys eligible for free school meals went to university compared to 26 per cent of working class young men from ethnic minority backgrounds. Some 34 per cent of girls from deprived ethnic minority families went to university, according to researchers.

Young white men from poor homes were eight and a half times less likely to go to university than ethnic minority women from middle-class families.

Overall, 58 per cent of men from Indian backgrounds and 66 per cent of women go on to university. Among Chinese families, 60 per cent of boys and 65 per cent of women go to university.

Black Caribbean boys were the only group less likely to go to university than white boys.

The Conservatives said the disclosure proved that Labour was failing pupils from poor homes.

But the Government insisted a series of programmes had been launched to break down the barriers, including sending successful male role models into state schools.

In Leicester, undergraduates hold a football competition for schoolboys to give them a taste of student life.

It is also hoped the Government's new-style diploma qualifications - combining work-based training and classroom study - will prove more popular than traditional A-levels among many young men.

Minority ethnic groups break through the class barrier – with exceptions

http://www.jrf.org.uk/pressroom/releases/141105.asp

Younger generations from many of Britain's minority ethnic groups are succeeding in breaking through the class barrier. Educational achievements have helped children of working-class parents in the Caribbean, African, Indian and Chinese communities to obtain managerial and professional jobs at a faster rate than their white counterparts, according to research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

But the study, based on surveys tracing children's progress over 30 years, finds that young people from the Pakistani community are an exception. Although their parents are heavily concentrated in the working class, they show less upward mobility than children from white manual workers' families. Bangladeshis are similarly disadvantaged but unlike young Pakistanis, this can be more readily explained by education and other characteristics of their backgrounds.

Lucinda Platt, a Lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Essex, analysed data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study on 140,000 children who grew up between the 1960s and the 1980s. Her research showed that family background and class had an important influence on later employment: children whose parents were in the managerial or professional classes were more likely to end up in higher-status jobs, even after account was taken of differences in educational achievement. Coming from a more advantaged background also tended to reduce their chances of unemployment.

An expansion in professional and managerial occupations over the past 30 years has created more 'room at the top', giving rise to an increase in upward mobility. Even so, a comparison between children whose parents were born overseas and white children of parents born in the UK showed young people from many minority ethnic groups were making disproportionate progress.

After controlling the data for family background differences, Caribbean, Black African, Indian and Chinese young people were more likely to have found professional or managerial jobs than their white, non-migrant counterparts. This was consistent with evidence that migrants often experienced downward mobility on entering Britain and that they hold strong aspirations for their children – which may have been part of their original reason for migrating in search of a new life.
Upward mobility among children from minority ethnic groups was due to their educational achievements. This suggested that migrant parents often encouraged and motivated their children to gain good qualifications
The general picture did not apply to children of Pakistani migrants. Their class disadvantage, relative to young people from other ethnic groups, could not be explained by differences in family background, or differences in their education. However, these factors did help to explain the class disadvantage found among children of Bangladeshi migrants.
Looking at differences between religious groups, the study found that second-generation Jews and Hindus tended to be more upwardly mobile than their Christian counterparts after controlling for background factors. Muslims and Sikhs were less likely to have moved into higher paid employment than their migrant parents. These differences could not simply be explained by ethnic origin.
Lucinda Platt said: "This study shows that social class and privilege have retained their importance in the past thirty years in assisting young people to access the educational opportunities that help them into higher status jobs. Britain is still a long way from being a 'meritocracy' where social class no longer plays a part in determining children's chances of well-paid careers.

"There is good news to the extent that a disproportionate number of the young people who are upwardly mobile are the children of parents who came to this country as migrants. But their welcome progress is no cause for complacency – especially when it appears to be so much harder for young people from Pakistani or Bangladeshi families to get ahead. We need to do much more to understand why this is happening and the extent to which factors such as racial discrimination are involved."

Most of the smarter members of the white working class (my grandparents) saw the writing on the wall a long time ago, and encouraged their kids to go to college and get the hell out of "the old neighborhood." There are millions of cases of this happening around the country.

Nevertheless, you still have populations in places like Northeast Philadelphia and upstate New York where the grandparents/parents didn't have such an attitude and instead said things like "forget college, you can always get a job at the plant/mill." Among these people, you already see the emergence of a white underclass. These are the girls you see selling themselves to buy smack under the Frankford Avenue El in northeast Philly, or the guys stealing copper fixtures in Buffalo for money.

If you have a specialized skill (even without a college degree) than you are OK. If you went through life thinking that an unskilled job would be provided for you, or, if that failed, the city would pay you $50,000 a year to operate an elevator, than you are out of luck.

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