ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the class structures that three generations of young people entered between 1945 and the 2010s. It embeds youth transitions within a longer-term life course perspective, and shows how economic and occupational changes have altered the risks and opportunities that have arisen during the working lives of entrants into different classes, always in ways that none could have expected or predicted. However, in retrospect we can identify a persistent tendency since the 1940s for middle-class careers to change in benign ways, likely to have been welcomed by those directly affected, while the reverse has applied to persons who embarked on working-class life courses. Also, over time, the band of (upper) middle-class occupations benefitting from changes has grown narrower, and has accommodated smaller proportions of young people. The history ends with the prospects awaiting young people in the 2010s which are as firmly classed as ever, but in different ways than the opportunities that awaited their parents 30 years earlier, and even more different from the class structures that their grandparents would typically have entered between 1945 and the mid-1950s.
