Resumen de The prize for hard work: effort, educational attainment and the transmission of social inequality
Children hear since a very young age that they should try hard to achieve their goals because effort is crucial if they want to succeed in life. The statement rests on two assumptions: effort is a very important predictor of future life outcomes, and individuals have full agency to decide to exert it. Indeed, liberal societies have embraced the equality of opportunities paradigm, which posits that every person has the same chances of succeeding in life, independently of ascriptive characteristics (Swift, 2005). Under this normative ideal, socioeconomic status is only determined by choices, effort and ability (we will come back to the role of ability in the next section). Thus, inequality in outcomes due to those factors can be regarded as fair (Roemer, 1998). This notion began to develop around the mid-twentieth century with the coming of the post-industrial society. As economic development increased its dependence on knowledge, education gained importance (Bell, 1976). Therefore, according to the functionalist theory, to satisfy the increasing demand for high-skilled workers, the states expanded the educational system to cover the entire population. The underlying intention was to improve the educational level of the whole population to maximize the potential of individuals from poorer backgrounds that in other conditions would not have been educated. In this context, education functions as a bridge between family and society, socializing individuals into the values of individualism, competition and achievement (Parsons, 1951). The new type of society required a new form of social stratification with education at the core of the postindustrial system. Hence, educational attainment became the main determinant of socioeconomic status to incentivize the acquisition of skills. The condition was that all individuals would have the same opportunities of getting an education. It would only depend on their intelligence and effort to achieve the desired level (Blau and Duncan, 1967). This paradigm of society became known as meritocracy. Ironically, the term was coined by Michael Young (1958) in a dystopian novel as a criticism of such system. However, nowadays it has become widely accepted as the ideal normative framework.
But is not the same to regard meritocracy as the ideal paradigm as actually having a meritocratic society. A lot of research in the last decades has investigated the intergenerational transmission of inequality, particularly in sociology. Scholars analyze the relationship between classes or occupations in different generations, analyzing which factors contribute to the persistence of social inequality. Indeed, they find that educational attainment is the major determinant factor of class mobility (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 2002). Nevertheless, there is also a lot of evidence showing that family background exerts a strong impact on educational attainment through several channels such as economic resources, social networks or cultural assets (Breen and Jonsson, 2005). Moreover, education does not come close to cancelling existing inequality; more direct redistribution from the state is required to guarantee equality of opportunities (Solga, 2014). Back to the initial premise, substantial research has investigated the importance of intelligence for educational attainment and its role in the transmission of educational inequality (Bowles and Gintis, 2002; Heckman et al., 2006). However, the same cannot be said about effort.
Bridging literature from economics, psychology and sociology, this thesis seeks to investigate the role of effort as a determinant of educational attainment and as a potential channel of social inequality. One of the main challenges of research on effort is its inherent abstraction as a concept. Everybody has a clear intuition of what it is, but there is no universally established definition. This derives from the difficulty when trying to measure it. Here, I frame effort within the literature of non-cognitive skills –or personality traits as psychologists prefer to say- because several of those, such as conscientiousness, locus of control or grit, are closely related to effort. These concepts are usually measured by self-reported questionnaires, which can be problematic (Apascaritei et al., 2021). Therefore, I focus on cognitive effort, which can be defined as the “mobilization of mental resources to fulfill a task” (Radl and Miller, 2021: p.). For operationalization, I use two recently developed direct measures of effort. The thesis contributes to the existing literature by studying its impact on educational attainment in the short and long run. Furthermore, it examines potential mechanisms proposed by sociological theories through which effort might contribute to the reproduction of educational inequality. Specifically, it tests its role as a mediator between parental socioeconomic status and educational attainment and as a moderator in inequality processes. In summary, the thesis analyzes the extent to which the meritocratic ideal is accomplished in contemporaneous societies by studying the impact of its core element, effort, on educational attainment and on inequality.
In Chapter 2, I examine the role of effort as a determinant of educational attainment. To do so, I use a proxy of effort that was recently developed to measure effort exerted in the PISA test. This contrast with the approach of non-cognitive skills proxies, such as conscientiousness of locus of control, that are measured by self-reports. Thus, the first aim is to study the impact of exerted effort on future educational attainment. Furthermore, the chapter also investigates the role of effort in the transmission of educational inequality. As outlined above, two sociological theories posit different mechanisms through which inequality could be transmitted by the mediation of effort. The Cultural Reproduction Theory (CRT) claims that children from high SES families inherit cultural resources, behaviors and attitudes that help them in future life outcomes, and attitudes towards effort could be one of those. Therefore, the second objective is to test the mediation of effort between parental SES and educational attainment. The Wisconsin status attainment model states that the central pillar for educational attainment is educational expectations. Those children from high SES families adopt high expectations from their parents and social environment, which leads them to achieve the expectations. The last objective is to study whether effort mediates between educational expectations and educational attainment. I use the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY), an Australian longitudinal database that follows the individuals who participate in the PISA test 2003 during the next 10 years. The results provide evidence of the positive impact that test effort has on the completion of tertiary education 10 years later. Furthermore, it seems that effort does mediate between educational expectations and educational attainment, but not between parental SES and educational attainment. This suggests that effort contributes to the transmission of inequality through the mechanism outlined by the Wisconsin model.
Chapter 3 addresses the effect of social influence on effort in a cross-country study. More specifically, I use peer effects as a proxy of social influence in school since it has been shown that it is an important determinant of educational attainment. In this chapter, I propose that effort might be one of the channels through which peer effects influence educational attainment. The mechanism stems from the Wisconsin model, which states that individuals tend to imitate the educational expectations of their school peers. Therefore, if an individual has peers with high parental SES, he/she will develop higher expectations, and thus, exert higher effort in educational activities to accomplish the expectations. To test the mechanism, I analyze the influence of having high SES peers in school on effort. Furthermore, I study the potential asymmetry of the effect and the impact of peer heterogeneity. Finally, I explore the peer effects in different educational tracks. As in Chapter 2, I use the variable of test effort constructed with PISA 2012. The results provide support to the suggested mechanism. The impact of having high SES peers on test effort is significant and the magnitude is quite large in comparison with other covariates. Moreover, the impact is homogeneous throughout the distribution of effort. Peer heterogeneity in school affects negatively effort, but the magnitude is very small. The results also show that the importance of peer effects is similar for students in comprehensive tracks and vocational tracks, but the effect disappears for students in the academic track.
Chapter 4 studies again the importance of effort for educational attainment. In contrast to Chapter 2, this paper uses a novel and objective measure of cognitive effort that derives from an experiment with primary students that perform three different real-effort tasks. The new measure is very comprehensive because it taps into different executive functions and has strong claims of validity. Additionally, another measure of effort is used for comparison, namely teacher-perceived effort. This measure is significantly more subjective but very important for the educational achievement of students since teachers also grade them. Hence, I analyze the impact of these two different measures of effort on school grades. Furthermore, I keep the focus on the potential role of effort as a contributor to the transmission of inequalities. Here, I study two potential mechanisms: compensatory advantage and teacher bias. Compensatory advantage states that high SES families might compensate for potential setbacks that their children suffer during childhood. I propose that students from high SES families that exert low effort could be compensated by their parental resources such as having more help while doing homework or hiring private tutors. Therefore, high SES students would be less penalized on school grades by the low level of effort than their poorer counterparts. The second mechanism derives from CRT and the literature that finds teachers to be biased when they judge the students due to their socioeconomic characteristics. Hence, it is possible that teachers penalize less-advantaged students more than richer students when they perceive low effort. This might be due to unconscious bias or because they consider other characteristics derived from the SES as relevant for grades. The results show a strong and positive effect of both cognitive and teacher-perceived effort on school grades. In the case of cognitive effort, its magnitude is similar to or even larger than the effect of cognitive skills, considered one of the key determinants of academic achievement. The effect of teacher-perceived effort is even larger, between two and three-fold the size of cognitive skills. This suggests that teachers are also influenced by other factors when they judge the effort exerted by students. Regarding the mechanisms that could moderate the effect of effort, the findings do not provide evidence for the existence of compensatory advantage with cognitive effort. Indeed, its effect is independent of parental SES. However, the interaction between parental SES and teacher-perceived effort is significant and negative as expected. Low SES students are more penalized than their richer counterparts on school grades when teachers perceive that they exert low effort.
Overall, the results of this thesis yield more bad than good news for the equality of opportunity paradigm. On the positive side, results in Chapters 2 and 4 show that the impact of effort on educational attainment is significant and positive. Simply put, hardworking kids obtain better educational outcomes. The magnitude of this meritocratic effect is smaller in the first paper –although still substantial- probably because the measure of effort is partial and the variable of educational attainment takes place in the long run -having completed tertiary education ten years later. Thus, focusing on the third empirical paper, which employs arguably the most complete measurement of cognitive effort available thus far, we observe that its impact on academic achievement is very large, at the same level of cognitive skills, one of the established main predictors of achievement. It is also important to highlight that the impact of effort is independent of parental SES. Therefore, the thesis provides support for one of the basic assumptions of the meritocratic discourse. If children exert more effort they will get significantly better grades, independently of their socioeconomic background.
On the negative side, this thesis provides evidence of one mechanism through which effort contributes to the persistence of inequality through generations. Specifically, effort mediates between educational expectations and educational attainment. This is relevant because according to the Wisconsin model, individuals shape their educational expectations influenced by their parental background and the social environment in which they live. Thus, children from high SES families living in rich neighborhoods will develop very high educational expectations, and the opposite will happen for less-advantaged children. The finding of Holtmann et al. (2021) that educational aspirations are a strong mediator of intergenerational educational transmission is complemented by this result because it provides evidence of one particular mechanism, effort. Furthermore, another aspect that contributes to the persistence of inequality is related to the effort as perceived by the teacher. Our evidence indicates that students from less-privileged families are penalized more than their richer counterparts. This is another example of teachers being influenced by the socioeconomic characteristics of the students, which has been already shown by other studies (Jæger, 2011; Jæger and Møllegaard, 2017). Needless to say, this is particularly concerning because, at the end of the day, teachers are the gatekeepers of the educational process. Furthermore, we should keep in mind that although the effect of effort on educational attainment is quite large, it is similar to the effect of parental education.
The assessment of the meritocratic paradigm stemming from this thesis leaves a bittersweet taste. The relevance of effort for educational outcomes is out of the question. Its impact rivals in magnitude with cognitive skills. As promised, if you exert more effort, you will be more successful. Nevertheless, the evidence presented in the dissertation also puts into question one of the key assumptions of the narrative, that effort is the most legitimate determinant because it only depends on the willingness of the individual to exert it. As some differences in effort exertion are due to ascriptive characteristics, individuals could wonder whether it is fair that these differences are socially rewarded. To design a fairer society we should consider whether to put effort as the main factor that legitimates the social hierarchy is appropriate.
