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WP202318-First-generation-elite-the-role-of-school-networks.pdf
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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.
Authors

Associate Director
Sarah is an Associate Director in the Education and Skills sector at the IFS, holding a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Kjell G. Salvanes

Lecturer University of York
Working Paper details
- DOI
- 10.1920/wp.ifs.2023.1823
- Publisher
- Institute for Fiscal Studies
Suggested citation
S, Cattan and K, Salvanes and E, Tominey. (2023). First generation elite: the role of school networks. 23/18. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/first-generation-elite-role-school-networks-0 (accessed: 7 December 2023).
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