Social mobility

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how  four broken promises are fuelling young people’s frustration. Come with me as I dig deeper into one aspect: the breakdown of social mobility in Europe.

Julius E. O. Fintelmann

Work hard, get a degree, buy a house. For young Europeans, the recipe for a better life is falling apart.

France, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, and beyond. Young people were once again on the streets across Europe last Saturday. These protests had different triggers, for instance anger over school conditions in France, or opposition to the potential return of conscription in Germany.

But there’s one shared, underlying frustration: many young people feel that they won’t have a better life than their parents. And there are reasons for that feeling.

A decades-long development is coming to a head: social mobility has stalled across much of Europe. It refers to the ability to move up – or down – the social and economic ladder – a core promise of liberal democracy.

It’s mainly measured by occupation, income, and education level. Can someone whose parents never went to university get a degree? Can they find a job that pays better than their parents’ work does?

Increasingly, the answer to both questions is no. In an “average OECD country”, it takes around four to five generations for children from the poorest 10% of households to reach the mean income levels, according to the organisation itself.

The OECD also found that upward mobility for people with less-educated parents increased for those born up until 1975. It then stalled for those born after that year.

A working paper by three German economists in 2025 found that intergenerational income mobility has fallen sharply. West Germans born in the 1980s were much more likely to end up in a similar position on the income ladder to their parents than people born around ten years earlier. Depending on the measure, the link between parents’ and children’s incomes roughly doubled in that time span.

Germany, long seen as far more mobile than the US, is now about as unequal in terms of opportunity, the paper found.

Part of the explanation for this, according to the paper, is education. Not because degrees have become less valuable, but because access to them is unequal.

As access to university widened, the share of graduates among children from the poorest quarter of households barely changed. Among better-off families, it roughly doubled.

The authors suggest cuts to Germany’s student grant system may be partly to blame. By 1998, only one in eight students was receiving support. It’s worse now: by 2024, it had slipped further. Only around one in nine students received it.

What adds to the perception that young people’s futures are being pushed down the political priority list is the massive surge in defence spending at the same time – no matter how justified given Europe’s deteriorating security situation.

And it’s not just Germany. Across 23 countries, including outside of Europe, people whose parents didn’t graduate university were almost half as likely to become top earners than their more privileged peers.

The reverse is also true: lower levels of education lead to more poverty. In Europe, those with university-educated parents have a significantly lower at-risk-of-poverty rate (8.5%) than those with less-educated parents (19.1%).

But it’s not equally bad everywhere. The Nordics, with their ingrained social democratic economic model, still show stronger social mobility than other parts of Europe. Whether your parents went to university matters least there – and most in countries like Italy, Portugal, and Poland.

The difficulty with social mobility statistics is that they can only assess a generation once it reaches middle age. Today’s 25-year-olds therefore won’t appear in traditional data for another 15 to 20 years – meaning their frustration is more anticipatory. But current conditions offer little reason to believe that their situation will be any better than those of people born in the 1980s.

Take housing, for instance, a key driver of social inequality. Across the EU, house prices rose over 55% between 2010 and 2024 – far outpacing income and inflation.

And famously, to buy a house, you need savings. But the median net wealth of 16- to 34-year-olds in the euro area is just over €24,000, less than a fifth of the overall median.

That means young people increasingly need help from their families to buy a house. For many young people, owning a decent home is becoming ever more out of reach.

Education, housing, wealth: each problem feeds the next. Without family money, it’s harder to study. Without a degree, it’s harder to earn well. Without savings, it’s harder to buy a home – and without that, there’s little wealth to pass on.

Addressing the stagnation of social mobility in Europe wouldn’t just make societies fairer. It would also make economic sense: the consultancy giant McKinsey, of all organisations, wrote that improving social mobility could boost Europe’s GDP by up to 9%.

The European Correspondent