First generation elite: the role of school networks

Sarah Cattan (), Kjell G Salvanes and Emma Tominey ()
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Sarah Cattan: Institute for Fiscal Studies

No 23-04, CEPEO Working Paper Series from UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities

Abstract: High school students from non-elite backgrounds are less likely to have peers with elite educated parents than their elite counterparts in Norway. We show this difference in social capital is a key driver of the high intergenerational persistence in elite education. We identify a positive elite peer effect on enrolment in elite programmes and disentangle underlying mechanisms. Exploiting a lottery in the assessment system, a causal mediation analysis shows the overall positive peer effect reflects a positive effect on application behaviour (conditional on GPA), which dominates a negative effect on student GPA. We consider implications for income mobility finding that encouraging further mixing between elite and non-elite students in high school could improve mobility across the whole distribution.

Keywords: Peers; Elite university; Subject choice; Social mobility; Teacher bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J24 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 75 pages
Date: 2023-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-des, nep-eur, nep-lma, nep-soc and nep-ure
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https://repec-cepeo.ucl.ac.uk/cepeow/cepeowp23-04.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: First generation elite: the role of school networks (2023)
Working Paper: First Generation Elite: The Role of School Networks (2022)
Working Paper: First Generation Elite: The Role of School Networks (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucl:cepeow:23-04

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