Young British white men are in trouble, it seems. They are the most derided group in Britain, according to a series of polls into the public’s attitudes to each other.

British people expect young white men to get drunk, be lazy, rude and to have several sexual partners. It also appears that young white men are the demographic group least likely to go to university. Dr Mary Curnock Cook, the chief executive of Ucas (the university admissions service), said recently that “with further increases in the gap between men and women entering higher education, we can now see clearly that concentrating outreach efforts on young men, particularly white men, would make a significant contribution to diminishing the rich-poor gap”.

Is this a crisis of young white masculinity? We need to read the small print and place this in the context of the intense way that class, gender and racial divisions are reinforcing each other in Britain today.

To be sure, the view that young white men are losing out picks up on real historical shifts. Dramatic social changes in the last 50 years have profoundly undermined the cultural cohesion and solidarities of male white working-class lives. Until the 1960s most white working-class boys expected to learn manual skills from their older peers, often through apprenticeships or on-the-job training.

There was a strong sense of male pride and self-respect, often exemplified in loyal membership of trade unions. And a degree of respect was also accorded more generally to the “hardy souls of toil”. Coalminers, engine drivers, shipbuilders and the like had a heroic resonance which was recognised – sometimes grudgingly – throughout British society. This was a world in which young white men could feel self-respect and a sense that they were subordinate to no one. Alan Sillitoe’s classic 1950s novels Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner perfectly exemplify this image of a rugged, dogged, cussed – but also resilient – masculinity.

Over the last 50 years this world has collapsed. Swaths of deindustrialisation have removed vast areas of skilled manual work, with their attendant cultures of respectability and autonomy, leaving young men having to navigate a casual and insecure labour market.

Apprenticeship in its old forms virtually collapsed in the 1970s, after which point the only way to learn skills became through formal academic routes, where working-class boys fared relatively badly compared with middle-class kids. In place of white male working-class communities characterised by skill and pride, a new economy of insecure service-sector jobs offers very little in the way of security or self-respect.

The young working-class men of today have to learn to play by the rules of the game – and rules not of their own making – if they are to gain employment and make their way in the world. The result has certainly been to proliferate cultures of shame and redundancy in many old industrial areas. This has been compounded by the decline of trade unions and the shift of the Labour party in search of middle-class voters.

Young white men might indeed feel that they have no obvious place in British society. The old bastions of white male working-class culture have been gentrified. In place of the traditional routine of the factory whistle blowing at noon on Saturday, and the men going to football matches at 3pm after lunch in the pub, football has become a modern bastion of the middle and upper classes, characterised by expensive tickets and corporate hospitality.

Such trends have pervaded many arenas of working-class life, as the rich cultural life associated with working men’s clubs, trade unions, bowling clubs and brass bands has been severely curtailed. It is not surprising that there are now numerous media representations presenting young men as badly educated, awkward, deficient, and generally lacking in social graces – from Men Behaving Badly to The Inbetweeners.

The media is full of portayals of young white men as awkward and lacking in social grace, as in The Inbetweeners. Photograph: Allstar

On the face of it, these shifts might explain why young white men might feel derided – as suggested by last week’s YouGov poll for Prospect magazine – and lack the confidence to succeed educationally. However, there is more to it than this. For one thing, racism is not dead and buried. Racist views still proliferate and are used to marginalise black and ethnic minorities throughout society. In fact, their relative success in getting into higher education is a reflection of their determination to find a strategy to cope with racist stereotyping that might limit chances in the labour market. Seeking pathways into higher education is often a more viable route for relatively marginalised groups than other career strategies such as obtaining promotion within firms. It was by pulling this qualification lever from the 1960s onwards that young women began to contest the sexist practices and attitudes that they encountered.

However, as my recent book Social Class in the 21st Century demonstrates, we should not think that getting to university is a passport to a secure and lucrative career. What matters now is the kind of institution that you attend. In the 1970s, when only 10% of young people went to universities, attendance at any institution was prized and seen to be a marker of social mobility. However, in an era of mass higher education, with more than 40% of young people going to university, there is huge internal stratification within higher education.

It is access to elite universities, especially Oxbridge and the “golden triangle” of elite London colleges, that conveys the most advantages, and these are evident even when comparing such graduates with those attending other research-intensive Russell Group universities. These elite universities continue to be bastions of largely white privilege, even though this now incorporates a more cosmopolitan and global ethos. Black and ethnic minorities by contrast, especially British-born minorities, are more likely to be concentrated in new universities where there are fewer resources and where graduate prospects, especially for high-level professional and managerial jobs, are considerably worse.

Similar issues arise for gender inequality. While women now outnumber men among university students, and while they have succeeded in moving into some highly sought-after professional pathways – such as in law and medicine – they are still very much the minority in some prestigious academic specialisms which lead to well-paid careers – engineering, information technology, economics, and science-based subjects more generally. Although women have improved their position compared with men, there continue to be striking inequalities, especially at the highest levels.

In fact, when the details of the YouGov poll are examined, a much more complicated picture emerges, and there is ample evidence for the power of racism. The group which the public sees as least honest is young Pakistani men, with young black Caribbean men, Polish middle-aged men and Muslim men also scoring lower here than young white men. Similarly, young black Caribbean men (and to a lesser extent, Pakistani and Polish men) are more likely to be seen as violent compared with young white men.

The problem here is that YouGov obscured the answers to these telling questions by devising a generic composite score which lumps together responses to very different kinds of questions. It turns out that young white men are the most derided overall because they are seen as extremely likely to get drunk frequently and to have many sexual partners. But these behaviours are hardly as morally loaded and derided as being dishonest or violent. As is usually the case in social research, the devil lies in the detail.

The message is therefore much more complicated than that young white men form the most marginal group in Britain today. As the clear boundary between the world of manual working class and non-manual middle class fades, middle-income groups become unsure where they stand. These uncertainties can be mobilised against a variety of groups seen to be beyond the pale and which can therefore be scapegoated to give a sense of reassurance to those who can position themselves in more positive light. At times this politics of classification – as I call it in my book – is targeted against young white men, but at other times against ethnic minorities, and also against women – as for instance in the Vicky Pollard caricature in Little Britain.

Racism, sexism and classism are alive and kicking in Britain today: as inequality increases, so does the hostile stereotyping and marginalisation of those at the bottom.

Mike Savage is professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and co-director of the International Inequalities Institute

A Muslim woman and child in Bradford: the poll found Muslim and black Caribbean people were more discriminated against than those of Jewish, white and Chinese backgrounds. Photograph: David Levenson/Alamy

WHAT THE POLL SAYS

YouGov explored attitudes to 48 different groups, examining different combinations of ethnic, religious and national background, age brackets and genders.

White men in their 20s have the worst reputation, out of all 48 groups, for drunkenness, sleeping around, work and politeness. They also have the joint worst score, with young black Caribbean men, for a belief that they are prone to drug-taking.

People who voted Ukip in the May general election tend to be far more critical of Polish, Pakistani, Muslim and black Caribbean people than they are of Jewish, Chinese, white or Australian people, on virtually every characteristic, including intelligence.

Young Polish men are held in much higher regard than young white Britons. We think they are more likely to be polite and to help others – and far more likely to work hard.

Source: Peter Kellner/Prospect magazine