A global view on educational differences in career success: Organizational sponsorship, accumulated advantage, and the schooled society

Abstract

Despite education's dominance in the globalized knowledge economy, the ways and reasons why education impacts subjective and objective career success remain the object of debate. We propose a three-level contextual model to explain the effect of education on job satisfaction and work meaningfulness (indicators of subjective career success) and personal income (as indicator of objective career success). First, within the organizational context , employers rely on beliefs about school meritocracy to recruit and promote individuals, translating into differential opportunities for advancement that mediate education-based differences in career success. Second, considering the temporal context , educational differences in career success will increase throughout people's careers through processes of accumulated advantage. Age should thus moderate the education effect on career success. Third, the education effect should vary across cultural contexts , depending on the extent to which a society has become ‘schooled’. We test these claims using multi-level, multi-source data from 33,120 employees across 44 countries, sourced from the International Social Survey Programme, in combination with archival country-level data. Results from multilevel mediation and regression analyses show that (1) organizational sponsorship statistically mediates the education effect on career success to a significant extent, (2) educational disparities in work meaningfulness and personal income widen at higher age, and (3) there is partial evidence for cross-cultural variation in how education shapes career success. Our findings show that the education effect on career success is highly context-dependent and suggest that schooling should be understood not only as a reflection of economic and technological factors but also as a (global) cultural force.