He was educated at Wath Grammar School, and then took a first class honours degree in history at University College London, being much influenced by the teaching of Alfred Cobban and Gustaaf Renier.
Goldthorpe was a Junior Research Fellow and Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Leicester from 1957 to 1960, working on the structure of a new degree with Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias.
He has had many graduate students who have become noted sociologists in Britain and abroad including Tak-Wing Chan, John Child, Colin Crouch, Gorana Djoric, Ricca Edmondson, Geoff Evans, Duncan Gallie, Anne Gauthier, Brendan Halpin, Niamh Hardiman, Anthony Heath, Geoffrey Ingham, Michelle Jackson, Yao-jun Li, Susan MacRae, John McCallum, José-Maria Maravall, Gordon Marshall, Deborah Posel, William Roche, Graeme Salaman, Sawako Shirahase and Meir Yaish.
But from the mid-1970s he became disappointed and disillusioned with the state of sociology in Britain, chiefly because of what he regarded as the undue dominance of socio-political commitments and pseudo-philosophical positions and the disregard of, if not actual hostility towards, new quantitative methods.
While at Cambridge, Goldthorpe undertook, together with David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer and Jennifer Platt, the Affluent Worker studies, which called into question the idea of the embourgeoisement of the British working class.
As an illustration, he produced, together with Richard Breen, a rational action model of class-linked differences in educational choice, which has been widely tested and discussed.
He also worked with Robert Erikson and Michelle Jackson on ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ effects in the creation of educational inequalities and, with these colleagues and in collaboration with David Cox, proposed statistical methods for distinguishing between the two and determining their relative importance.
A central theme of the book is the ‘disconnect’ that exists between the findings of sociological research and the discussion of social mobility and education in political and policy circles.