Do
Low-SES Students Get Less Payoff for Their School Efforts?
James
E. Rosenbaum and Stefanie DeLuca
Abstract
This paper examines two questions. Do youths' school
efforts have long-term influence on their adult educational attainment?
Are attainment processes less responsive to the efforts of low-SES
youth? This paper presents a critique of customary models which,
by inappropriately ignoring the multiple factors that determine
test scores, make us underestimate the influence of other factors
that are hidden in test scores, such as effort. Then, using the
10-year follow-up of the High School and Beyond (HSB) survey, we
examine the influence of high school effort, both before and after
controls for test scores. A strength of this study is that it examines
long-term outcomes at age 28. While many researchers have gloomily
predicted an IQ meritocracy that dooms people to their future station
in life, we find that effort has a large influence on educational
attainment. However, we find that low-SES youths' efforts have less
educational payoff. Although the magnitude of effort's influence
depends on whether one acknowledges that effort is built into test
scores, these results indicate that effort has significant influence
even independent of test scores. These results imply that low-SES
youth may have less incentive for school effort than other students.
James E. Rosenbaum, School
of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University
Stefanie DeLuca, Graduate fellow, Human Development
and Social Policy, Northwestern University
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