Individual Agency and the Life Course: Do Low-Ses Students Get Less Long-Term Payoff for Their School Efforts?

Abstract

Educational attainment has an important impact on the entire life course. This study adopts the life course emphasis on personal agency to examine the relationship between individual effort and later educational attainment and the possibility that individuals get different payoffs for their personal efforts, depending on their social class. Using the 10-year follow-up of the High School and Beyond (HSB) survey, this study finds that the customary approach to educational attainment is wrong on two counts. First, we find that students' high school efforts have a significant relationship with later educational attainment, even independent of academic achievement. Second, we find that socioeconomic status (SES) affects effort, effort predicts attainment net of SES, and the benefits of effort vary by SES. These results imply that efforts matter, but even if low-SES students strive very hard, their outcomes may not be improved as much as those of other students and so they may have less incentive for school effort.