First-Generation Elite: The Role of School Social Networks
Sarah Cattan, Kjell G. Salvanes, Emma Tominey
American Economic Review · 2025 · Volume 115 · Issue 12
Abstract
High school students from non-elite backgrounds are less likely to have peers with elite-educated parents than their elite counterparts. 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 enrollment in elite programs and labor market earnings, then disentangle underlying mechanisms. Exploiting a lottery in assessment, a causal mediation analysis shows the overall positive peer effect reflects a positive effect on application behavior (conditional on GPA). When considering income mobility, we find that further mixing between high school elite and non-elite students could improve mobility.
Keywords
Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions, Analysis of Education, Higher Education, Research Institutions, Education and Inequality, Wage Level and Structure, Wage Differentials, Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility, Promotion, Economic Sociology, Economic Anthropology, Language, Social and Economic Stratification
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