Education is believed to be the way of achieving social mobility. Havighurst (1958) generalized several factors that could realize individual upward mobility, such as technological development, differential fertility, and individual talent and effort. Education affects all of these factors. Education plays a critical role in developing individual talent, knowledge, ability, as well as shaping one’s understandings of society. Through education, lower class people change consumption habits, learn middle class values, and then earn middle class possessions. Once lower-class people possess the same values, beliefs, and material possessions to the middle class, they may achieve social upward mobility.

However, on the other hand, education also prevents such upward mobility, and reinforces the social class reproduction. Schools become one of the most important pipes through which education reproduces social classes. In Henward and Grace’s (2016) article, children in kindergartens of different levels showed different understanding of their privileged social locations. Such kinds of understandings were inconsistent across the schools at different levels. One of the explanations can be attributed to children's own family backgrounds as the access to different levels of school environments is dependent on family income and social connections; in other words, family social location/ social class (Anyon, 1980). Furthermore, what children learnt from school varies across the social levels of schools. Children socialized within elite environments leant how to be, act and conduct oneself beyond which were in harmony with the middle and upper middle class. In such elite environments, elite school children showed notable confidence and remarkable understanding of their privilege in school choice. Thus, family social background sends children to the schools of their social location, and reversely, schools reinforce the social locations among childrens.

Neo-Marxism attempted to theorize this process. Bowles and Gintis (1976) argued the experience and skills that students acquired from school of different social classes would characterize their later occupational positions (Anyon, 2011). In other words, education was to reproduce social stratifications. Bowles and Gintis (1976), from the perspective of neo-Marxism, pointed out that schooling functions primarily to legitimate and reproduce inequality, and it sometimes produces critics, rebels, and radicals.

This point of view echoes Collins’ (1971) view of social conflict. Collins argued that society is made up of associational groups that share common status cultures and struggle for advantages which are limited in supply. Among the common status cultures, one is education. Education is not only the factor dividing different status groups, but also it is the way to shift from one group to another. Therefore, schools of a certain social class context usually accept students in the corresponding social class context and then reproduce members of the same social class because these schools convey the common status cultures of that social class. From such a perspective, if one wants to achieve upward social mobility, they must struggle through educational organizations which are controlled by different status groups as the advantages, such as common social culture, are inherent to status groups in society. Thus, individuals can get and share the same culture to upper status groups throughout education, then they can get access to those more advantaged social groups.

These theories are real in our life. For example, in China, parents usually devote huge amounts of money and time to helping their children get into elite schools. Parents purchase real estate that belongs to elite school districts, pay extra tuition fees, and even make monetary donations, etc. Enrolling in elite schools is believed to contribute to their children's upward social mobility. Does it work? Sometimes. The resources provided by elite schools do help students move forward and upward in their life trajectory. For example, the rate of enrolling in top universities for an elite high school in Beijing can be more ten times higher than it for an average high school in other cities. Top universities usually lead to a better job in the future. However, not everyone has chances to go to elite schools. As we mentioned above, it may require advantaged family social status. Thus, schooling, on one hand, reproduces inequality; on the other hand, it provides ways of upward mobility.