Perceived decline in social mobility is an important and challenging topic for OECD countries, especially in the youth agenda (OECD, 2018). Education is typically seen as a major social elevator, given the relatively high returns to education (Psacharopoulos, Patrinos, 2018; Altonji, Zhong, 2021), and despite socioeconomic inequality in access to high-quality education institutions and especially tertiary education (Duta, Wielgoszewska, Iannelli, 2021; Malinovskiy, Shibanova, 2022). At the same time, the massification of tertiary education, resulting in the growing number of graduates aspiring for social status associated with highly qualified specialists, accompanied by a high level of labor force participation due to population aging, puts more pressure on the mechanism of social elevators.

Social mobility can be measured objectively in terms of earnings, income, or social class. The perceived (subjective) approach to measuring social mobility offers a holistic assessment of social position (Duru-Bellat, Kieffer, 2008), encompassing both objective indicators and other well-being dimensions. The majority of empirical studies employ the former approach and measure income mobility (OECD, 2018) or objective mobility in terms of social class (Wielgoszewska, 2018), while perceived social mobility, especially in the youth samples and in the context of education and career pathways, remains understudied.

Whereas the majority of Russian youth and their parents aspire to higher education (Kondratenko, Kiryushina, Bogdanov, 2020), an increasing proportion of younger cohorts get higher education (from 20% for those born in the 1950s to 35% in the 1990s), which is comparable with European countries (Bessudnov, Kurakin, Malik, 2017). On the other hand, the stratification of universities and the heterogeneity of tertiary education in Russia (Malinovskiy, Shibanova, 2022) make this aspiration challenging in terms of social mobility. At the same time, combining study and work has become a widespread phenomenon (Beerkens, Mägi, Lill, 2011), including in Russia, where graduates who combine study and work experience a 30% wage premium (Rudakov, Roshchin, 2019; Dudyrev, Romanova, Travkin, 2020). This pattern of school-to-work transition could have become a new tool for promoting social mobility.

Using data from the Russian national cohort longitudinal study "Trajectories in Education and Career, this study aims to untangle the ten-year education-career pathways of 9th-grade students by the age of 25. Our study aims to identify the different types of pathways followed by Russian youth (with a special focus on college graduates) in their journey from school to work and explore how these pathways contribute to perceived social mobility. We investigate pathways following the sociological approach and methodology of sequence analysis while considering the key findings of labor economists, thus embracing the framework of socioeconomic background, educational inequalities, and human capital theory. We investigate how the paths through postsecondary education and the world of work, as well as an extended set of socio-demographic factors, shape patterns of perceived social mobility and which educational or career pathways contribute to the upward and downward mobility patterns.

Our research contributes to the studies of social stratification and life trajectories of youth, taking into account the variety of school-to-work transition patterns (Boylan, 2020; Wielgoszewska, 2018). The use of longitudinal data and sequence analysis enables us to overcome the limitations of cross-sectional studies in the epoch of increasing nonlinearity and complexity of paths (Sullivan, Ariss, 2021) and decreased relevance of one-time measures of school-to-work transition (Duta, Wielgoszewska, Iannelli, 2021).

We trace the ten-year trajectories of Russian youth, employing the data from the ten waves (2012–2021) of the Russian national cohort longitudinal study "Trajectories in Education and Career" (TrEC). The study follows a nationally representative sample of 9th-grade students through high school and on to postsecondary attainment or work. The longitudinal study TrEC is based on similar ones from Switzerland (TREE), Canada (YITS), and Australia (LSAY) and contains PISA and TIMSS results as well as questions about educational and career choices and family status (Malik, 2019). We used sequence analysis followed by cluster analysis to derive the typology of their educational and career trajectories (Monaghan, 2020; Maltseva, Rozenfeld, 2022). A sequence consists of a series of states in which respondents are found at different points in their life course within an observation period, in our case between the ages of 15 (16) and 25 (26). The sequences were built based on the following states in the education and labor market: 1) studying at school; 2) studying at a vocational school; 3) studying at the university; 4) combining study and work; 5) temporary or permanent employment; 6) inactivity or unemployment. The research sample of respondents who have passed all the waves of the longitudinal study and have answers in every wave about education and work (i.e., are suitable for sequence analysis) includes 2935 observations. This number includes imputed missing states. The subsample of college graduates includes 1539 observations. We measure subjective social mobility as a difference between the respondent's subjective social status in the last wave and the perception of the family's status during the respondent's adolescence, employing the scale of a social ladder with 10 stages (where 1 is the lowest social status and 10 is the highest) (Kelley, Evans, 1995). Firstly, three groups of social statuses were made: bottom (from 1 to 4), middle (5, 6 stages), and top (from 7 to 10), which were created according to the quartiles of the status data (median = 5th stage, Q3 = 7th stage). Secondly, we assign 3 mobility patterns: downward (including top-bottom, middle-bottom, and top-middle), upward (bottom-top, middle-top, and bottom-middle), and immobility when the family and personal status groups match. Finally, we used logistic regression models to estimate the probability of belonging to the subjective social mobility pattern (downward, upward, and immobile) for a given educational and career trajectory while controlling for a set of background characteristics, including parental educational attainment.

The educational and career trajectories of Russian youth are ambiguously linked to subjective social mobility. The ten-year educational pathway without accounting for work does not function as a statistically significant predictor of subjective social mobility by the age of 25. Only a postponed education pathway without finished postsecondary education predicts subjective downward mobility. On the contrary, career trajectories do matter for subjective social mobility. Combining study and work (during both vocational and higher education) is associated with an upward mobility pattern, while those who stay for a long time in education without entering the labor market are statistically significantly less likely to experience subjective upward mobility by the age of 25. Youth experiencing short-term postsecondary education without work are especially vulnerable to downward mobility. Similar results were obtained on the subsample of college graduates, who have more chances to experience upward mobility as higher education attainers. However, they are likely to experience downward mobility more often compared to vocational graduates. HE graduates with education-career pathways that include postgraduate education have significantly more chances for subjectively measured downward mobility. This unexpected finding could be interpreted in multiple ways, i.e. graduates with postgraduate degrees (meaning prolonged education and mostly part-time jobs) by the age of 25 are unable to reach the high status of their parents. Controlling parental educational attainment, we found a positive relationship between upward social mobility and trajectories with early entrance to the labor market. Therefore, our finding that the early start of career pathways through combining study and work plays a crucial role in the mechanism of social mobility for the youth is relevant for both Russian youth in general and university graduates.

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