Late-Stage Educational Inequality: Can Selection on Academic and Noncognitive Skills Explain Waning Social Background Effects?

Past research finds that the effect of socioeconomic origin on the probability of making educational transitions decreases for successively higher educational transitions, suggesting for example that one’s family of origin matters less for college entry than it does for high school completion. This pattern of waning effects could well be the result of selective attrition, since those of modest social origins who make a given transition may have unobserved characteristics, such as cognitive or noncognitive skills, that help them make the next transition, while better off individuals may be less steeply selected on these characteristics. We study a sample of American 10th graders from 1980 to assess how much the pattern of waning effects is due to selective attrition along academic and noncognitive skills for this cohort. We find that controlling for academic skills makes the effect of socioeconomic status more stable across transitions, but controlling for noncognitive skills does not. Socioeconomic advantage does not decline uniformly across transitions, and it appears most pronounced at the transition into college. These results do not support a claim that late transitions are egalitarian.