First-generation university graduates have been found to face a series of disadvantages on their pathway to higher education and the labor market. We use unique, national level data on high achieving university graduates to attempt to disentangle the importance of lower prior attainment from...

International large-scale assessments such as PISA are increasingly being used to benchmark the academic performance of young people across the world. Yet many of the technicalities underpinning these datasets are misunderstood by applied researchers, who sometimes fail to take their complex...

This paper contributes to the literature on the earnings returns to university graduation. Recent evidence using administrative earnings data from England suggests a zero return to graduation for men and positive returns to graduation for women in annual earnings at age 26. We show that once...

Recent evidence on the gender wage gap shows that it has remained stagnant for those with a university degree and is the largest at the top of the earnings distribution. Many studies have explored institutional factors that contribute to the gender wage gap, but there is little evidence on the...

'Bullshitters' are individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill. Despite this being a well-known and widespread social phenomenon, relatively few large-scale empirical studies have been conducted into this issue. This paper attempts...

Universities around the world are attempting to increase the diversity of their student population. This includes individuals who are 'first in family' (FiF), those who achieve a university degree, but whose (step) parents did not. We provide the first large scale, quantitative evidence on FiF...

Universities use 'first in family' or 'first generation' as an indicator to increase the diversity of their student intake, but little is known about whether it is a good indicator of disadvantage. We use nationally representative, longitudinal survey data linked to administrative data from...

There has been much interest across the social sciences in the link between young people's socioemotional (non-cognitive) skills and their educational achievement. But much of this research has focused upon the role of the Big Five personality traits. This paper contributes new evidence by...

We exploit linked survey-administrative data from England to examine how first in family (FiF) graduates (those whose parents do not have university degrees) fare on the labor market. We find that among graduate women, FiF graduates earn 8.3% less on average than graduate women whose parents...

There is a large gender gap in the probability of being in a "top job" in mid-career. Top jobs bring higher earnings, and also have more job security and better career trajectories. Recent literature has raised the possibility that some of this gap may be attributable to women not "leaning in"...