The Declining Relative Importance of Ability in Predicting Educational Attainment

Abstract

Most countries seek to improve children's educational levels and standards.Commonly, this has taken the form of striving for greater educational attainment by able individuals from poor backgrounds.Britain has certainly experienced a substantial rise in education levels.For example, in 1960, just 12% of all British students stayed past compulsory school leaving age (15); this has since risen to 70%.In this study, we use two unique British panel datasets to test whether this rise in enrolment has been associated with an increased reliance on cognitive ability in determining educational achievement or whether parental income and other measures of socioeconomic status have become better predictors of school attainment.We find that early cognitive ability became a less important predictor of subsequent educational performance.This is partly because the average performance of low ability children increased during the time period.

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