The main question addressed in this paper is what happens when the usual sociological predictors (family background and educational attainment, for example) fail to predict labour market success and failure The paper presents evidence from surveys conducted in 1999 among 1300 25-26 year olds in...

Middling youth were centre stage in research on school-to-work transitions from the early-20th century up to and throughout the 1980s. Since then they have been overshadowed by sociological attention to the young unemployed/NEETs on the one side, and university students and graduates on the...