The Declining Relative Importance of Ability in Predicting Educational Attainment

(2005) - Fernando Galindo-Rueda, Anna Vignoles

Journal: Journal of Human Resources
Link:: http://jhr.uwpress.org/lookup/doi/10.3368/jhr.XL.2.335
DOI:: 10.3368/jhr.XL.2.335
Links::
Tags:: #paper #NCDS #CognitiveAbility #SchoolType
Cite Key:: [@galindo-ruedaDecliningRelativeImportance2005]

Abstract

Most countries seek to reduce inequality by encouraging educational attainment, particularly by striving for better outcomes for able individuals from poor backgrounds. We analyse whether this has been a feature of Britain’s substantial expansion of education during the past several decades. We use two unique longitudinal studies to test whether these improvements have been associated with changes in the role of cognitive ability and parental background in determining educational achievement. We find a decline in the importance of ability in explaining educational performance, in part because low ability children with high economic status experienced the largest increases in educational attainment.

Notes

“We use two unique longitudinal studies to test whether these improvements have been associated with changes in the role of cognitive ability and parental background in determining educational achievement. We find a decline in the importance of ability in explaining educational performance, in part because low ability children with high economic status experienced the largest increases in educational attainment.” (Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles, 2005, p. 335)

“From an empirical perspective therefore, the key questions are whether family background (family income levels and social class) has become steadily less important in determining educational attainment, and, in corollary, whether actual ability has become a more important factor in predicting how well an individual will do in educational terms.” (Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles, 2005, p. 336)

“Whereas in 1960 just 12 percent of the cohort stayed on past the compulsory school-leaving age of 15 years old, 70 percent now stays on in school past the age of 16 (the current compulsory school leaving age) and 45 percent enter higher education.” (Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles, 2005, p. 336)

“Of course the variable that we are most interested in is cognitive ability. We follow the methodology used in Cawley et al. (1996) to construct our ability measure. Ability test scores obtained at the age of 11 for the 1958 NCDS cohort” (Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles, 2005, p. 338)

“Because the ability tests administered to the two cohorts were not exactly identical, it is not possible to use a raw test score in the analysis. Using dummies for quintiles of the distribution of separate scores has been the standard approach so far, but the relatively high correlation between the different test scores often leads to multicollinearity problems and other missing data issues.8 We therefore used principal components analysis to construct an index of cognitive ability for each survey, using the first principal component extracted.” (Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles, 2005, p. 340)

“Because there are more tests available in NCDS (5) than in BCS (3), we observe that the first principal component in the former case explains a lower proportion of the total variatio” (Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles, 2005, p. 340)

“As is evident from Table 3, a person’s early cognitive ability (whenever measured) is an important determinant of their final qualification level, consistent with the other literature in this field” (Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles, 2005, p. 343)

“For example, while around 63 percent of middle ability–low-income13 students reached O levels or higher among the 1958 cohort, this rose by five percentage points to 68 percent in the 1970 cohort. By contrast, 72 percent of middle ability students from the top of the income distribution reached O levels or higher in the 1958 cohort, rising 12 percentage points to 84 percent for the 1970 cohort.” (Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles, 2005, p. 347)

“Our main result is that cognitive ability played a lesser role in determining educational attainment for those born in 1970, as compared to an earlier generation born in 1958. During the period spanned by our two data sets (1960s to 1980s), Britain’s secondary education underwent a radical shift from selective to mixed ability schooling. This may have been important in explaining the declining role of early cognitive ability.” (Galindo-Rueda and Vignoles, 2005, p. 350)