2.3.1. Social Class and Capital Formation across Generations

During the Cold War, the movement toward mass higher education in Western democracies was informed by a social theory of class structures. Talcott Parsons's [50] theory on social forces in economic development evolved into a social system theory [51] that was foundational to the logics underlying America's move to mass higher education [1]. Class structure was more rigid in Western Europe than in the US, where sociologists focused on social mobilities within nations [52] as a cross-generational issue of uplift and social class transitions [53]. Europe retained dual technical and academic pathways, an approach that reinforced class inequalities. In contrast, the US narrowed the K-12 curriculum, marginalizing the nation's working class, who were once vital in supplying the European rebuilding process. The social research informing policy development also differed in the US and Western Europe.

Structural social theories of uplift had informed US policy. James Coleman [54] was the first researchers to study white flight from cities to suburbs after the court-mandated desegregation of urban school systems, leaving many inner-city schools predominantly Black. Later, he theorized that social capital in families was central to building social capital for cross-generation uplift. Later, he argued that moving to locales with stronger social cohesion was the primary mechanism for uplift [55]. US education policy began to focus on the improvement of urban schools, but the new policies were largely ineffectual because of the increasing concentration of poverty [56,57]. Neoliberals argued that the marketization of urban schools would improve quality and reduce inequality [58–60]. Instead, these mechanisms accelerated gentrification in some urban neighborhoods and reproduced poverty in others [61,62].

Critical social theories focusing on class reproduction had more influence on postsecondary policy in Western Europe than in the US. Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital theory [63–65] focused on education knowledge transmitted in families as a force in class reproduction. He argued that cultural transmission was more potent than educational content as an underlying force in inequality. These arguments informed activist research on student outreach in US high schools [66–68]. Adapted in Ireland, this community-based approach has had documented success across international contexts [44,69].
