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Cognitive and noncognitive skills are key indicators of educational success and merit. However, even when accounting for inequalities in skill formation by family socioeconomic status (SES), a wide SES-gap in college enrolment remains. According to the compensatory advantage hypothesis, SES-gaps in educational transitions are largest among cognitively weak students, but little is known on mechanisms. It has long been argued that noncognitive traits such as effort and motivation might be at least as important as cognitive skills over the status-attainment process, and these skills might interact by being complements or substitutes. Thus, I test whether advantaged students substitute low cognitive skills in test scores by high returns to conscientiousness—rated by teachers— in the transition to academic secondary schools. I draw data from the German National Educational Panel Study to study a cohort of students from Grades 1 to 5, when early tracking is enforced. I estimate linear probability models with school fixed-effects and moderation. To account for measurement error, I also use composite latent skills across elementary education. I report three main findings: (a) High-SES students at the same level of cognitive and noncognitive skills than low-SES schoolmates are more likely to attend the academic track bridged to college; (b) in line with the compensatory hypothesis, these SES-inequalities are largest among low cognitive performers; (3) cognitively weak students from high-SES families get the highest educational returns to conscientiousness in comparison to high cognitive performers or low-SES peers, validating the skill substitution hypothesis. These findings challenge the liberal conception of merit as the sum of ability plus effort in assessing equal opportunity in education.

Origen social y sobreeducación en los universitarios españoles: ¿es meritocrático el acceso a la clase de servicio?

This article bridges the literature on educational inequality between and within families to test whether high-socioeconomic status (SES) families compensate for low cognitive ability in the transition to secondary education in Germany. The German educational system of early-ability tracking (at age 10) represents a stringent setting for the compensatory hypothesis. Overall, previous literature offers inconclusive findings. Previous research between families suffers from the misspecification of parental SES and ability, while most within-family research did not stratify the analysis by SES or the ability distribution. To address these issues, I draw from the TwinLife study to implement a twin fixed-effects design that minimizes unobserved confounding. I report two main findings. First, highly educated families do not compensate for twins' differences in cognitive ability at the bottom of the ability distribution. In the German system of early-ability tracking, advantaged families may have more difficulties to compensate than in countries where educational transitions are less dependent on ability. Second, holding parents' and children's cognitive ability constant, pupils from highly educated families are 27% more likely to attend the academic track. This result implies wastage of academic potential for disadvantaged families, challenging the role of cognitive ability as the leading criterion of merit for liberal theories of equal opportunity. These findings point to the importance of other factors that vary between families with different resources and explain educational success, such as noncognitive abilities, risk aversion to downward mobility, and teachers' bias.

Recent studies document a social-origins gap or direct effect of social origin (DESO) on labour market outcomes over and above respondents’ education, challenging the idea that post-industrial societies are education-based meritocracies. Yet, the literature offers insufficient explanations on DESO heterogeneity across education and different labour market outcomes. Little is also known about underlying mechanisms. We contribute by answering two questions: (i) How does DESO vary when comparing college-degree holders with non-holders? (ii) For which specific parental and children’s occupations is the largest DESO observed? We focus on Spain, using a large new dataset (n = 144,286). Firstly, we find a larger DESO on socioeconomic status among non-degree holders, and on income among degree holders. We propose the notions of compensatory advantage in occupational attainment and boosting advantage in income for high social-origin individuals to explain these opposite patterns, drawing from ‘downward mobility avoidance’ and ‘effectively maintained inequality’ theories. Secondly, we map origin and destination micro-classes where DESO is largest. High-grade managerial and professional parental occupations, characterized by social closure and influence in large organizations, are the origin micro-classes exerting the largest DESO. We also find that compensatory advantage for low-educated children from advantaged origins is related to their higher chances of accessing managerial occupations, while boosting advantage on income among college graduates is observed for high-grade managers and liberal professionals, suggesting that micro-class reproduction may partially account for boosting advantage. We conclude by discussing the generalizability of our findings to other countries and their implications for research on DESO, meritocracy and social mobility.

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Neo-Weberian occupational class schemas, rooted in industrial-age employment relations, are a standard socio-economic position measure in social stratification. Previous research highlighted Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero (EGP)-based schemas’ difficulties in keeping up with changing labour markets, but few tested alternative explanations. This article explores how job tasks linked to technological change and rising economic inequality might confound the links between employment relations, classes, and life chances. Using the European Working Conditions Survey covering the European Union (EU)-27 countries, this article analyses over time and by gender: 1) the task distribution between social classes; and 2) whether tasks predict class membership and life chances. Decomposition analyses suggest that tasks explain class membership and wage inequality better than theorised employment relations. However, intellectual/routine tasks and digital tools driving income inequality are well-stratified by occupational classes. Therefore, this article does not argue for a class (schema) revolution but for fine-tuning the old instrument to portray market inequalities in the digital age.