scholarly journals The social and genetic inheritance of educational attainment: Genes, parental education, and educational expansion

2020 ◽  
Vol 86 ◽  
pp. 102387
Author(s):  
Meng-Jung Lin
Keyword(s):  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Parental Education ◽  
Educational Expansion ◽  
Genetic Inheritance ◽  
The Social

scholarly journals Educational Expansion and Social Mobility: The Scottish Case

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Iannelli
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Educational Policies ◽  
Educational Expansion ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
The Social

For over a century, the goal of reducing class inequalities in educational attainment has been based at least in part on the belief that this would help to equalise life chances. Drawing upon the main findings of three ESRC-funded projects, this paper reviews the empirical evidence on trends in social class inequalities in educational attainment and the role of education in promoting social mobility in Scotland. The findings show that in the second half of the twentieth century, despite the increase in overall levels of attainment, class differences in educational attainment persisted. Educational policies in Scotland supported educational expansion which allowed larger numbers of working-class children to climb the social class ladder than in the past. However, these did not translate into any break with the patterns of social inequalities in the chances of entering the top-level occupations. The conclusions highlight that educational policies on their own are not powerful enough to change patterns of social mobility which are mainly driven by labour market and social class structures.

scholarly journals The Social and Genetic Inheritance of Educational Attainment: Genes, Parental Education, and Educational Expansion

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meng-Jung Lin
Keyword(s):  
Standard Deviation ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Parental Education ◽  
Genetic Effect ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Environment Interaction ◽  
Genome Wide Association Studies ◽  
Standard Deviation Increase ◽  
Polygenic Score ◽  
The Social

Recently, several genome-wide association studies of educational attainment have found education-related genetic variants and enabled the integration of human inheritance into social research. This study incorporates the newest education polygenic score (Lee et al. 2018) into sociological research, and tests three gene-environment interaction hypotheses on status attainment. Using the Health and Retirement Study (N = 7,625), I report three findings. First, a standard deviation increase in the education polygenic score is associated with a 60% increase in the likelihood of advancing to the next level of education, while a standard deviation increase in parental education results in a 68% increase. Second, supporting the Saunders hypothesis, the genetic effect becomes 11% smaller when parental education is one standard deviation higher, indicating that highly educated parents are more able to preserve their family’s elite status in the next generation. Finally, the genetic effect is slightly greater for the younger cohort (1942~59) than the older cohort (1920~41). The findings strengthen the existing literature on the social influences in helping children achieve their innate talents.

scholarly journals Social origin and educational attainment in China: a historical analysis of 70 birth cohorts

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Changchun Fang ◽  
Xiaotian Feng
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Educational Inequality ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Social Origin ◽  
Birth Cohorts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact

Abstract The impact of social origin on educational attainment is conditioned on the social context in which people live. In recent decades, with changes in the Chinese society, how has the impact of social origin on educational inequality changed? Based on an analysis of 70 birth cohorts, this study details the effect of social origin on educational inequality and its trends over the past 70 years. The results of this study also indicate that the historical stages hypothesis (HSH) and model-shift hypothesis (MSH) emphasized in previous studies cannot fully describe the historical changes in educational inequality. In addition to macrosocial processes, there may exist other structural factors that also affect educational inequality but are neglected. The social context and its transformation, which shaped the relationship between social origin and educational inequality, need to be examined in more detail.

scholarly journals Human niche construction in interdisciplinary focus

2011 ◽  
Vol 366 (1566) ◽  
pp. 785-792 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Kendal ◽  
Jamshid J. Tehrani ◽  
John Odling-Smee
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Niche Construction ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Causal Process ◽  
Genetic Inheritance ◽  
Selection Pressures ◽  
Ecological Inheritance ◽  
Human Niche Construction ◽  
The Social

Niche construction is an endogenous causal process in evolution, reciprocal to the causal process of natural selection. It works by adding ecological inheritance , comprising the inheritance of natural selection pressures previously modified by niche construction, to genetic inheritance in evolution. Human niche construction modifies selection pressures in environments in ways that affect both human evolution, and the evolution of other species. Human ecological inheritance is exceptionally potent because it includes the social transmission and inheritance of cultural knowledge, and material culture. Human genetic inheritance in combination with human cultural inheritance thus provides a basis for gene–culture coevolution, and multivariate dynamics in cultural evolution. Niche construction theory potentially integrates the biological and social aspects of the human sciences. We elaborate on these processes, and provide brief introductions to each of the papers published in this theme issue.

scholarly journals Measuring social origin, cognitive ability and educational attainment in the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mollie Bourne ◽  
Bastian Andreas Betthäuser ◽  
Erzsebet Bukodi
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Study ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Cognitive Ability ◽  
Parental Education ◽  
Descriptive Statistics ◽  
Social Origin ◽  
Education Class ◽  
Key Variables ◽  
Class Status

This data note presents and discussed descriptive statistics of the key variables on individuals’ social origin, cognitive ability and educational attainment that have been constructed based on the information contained in the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE). The main sets of variables presented are (1) measures of respondents’ cognitive ability in childhood, (2) parental education, class, status and income, and (3) respondents’ highest qualification and measures indicating whether respondents have crossed different educational qualification thresholds.

scholarly journals The social class gap in bachelor’s and master’s completion: university dropout in times of educational expansion

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens-Peter Thomsen
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Bachelor's Degree ◽  
Disadvantaged Students ◽  
Educational Expansion ◽  
Master's Level ◽  
Percentage Points ◽  
The Social ◽  
Upper Secondary ◽  
University Dropout

While many papers have focused on socially unequal admissions in higher education, this paper looks at the persistence of class differentials after enrolment. I examine the social class gap in bachelor’s programme dropout and in the transition from bachelor’s to master’s in Denmark from the formal introduction of the bachelor’s degree in 1993 up to recent cohorts. Using administrative data, I find that the class gap in bachelor’s departures has remained constant from 1993 to 2006, with disadvantaged students being around 15 percentage points more likely to leave a bachelor’s programme than advantaged students, even after adjusting for other factors such as grades from upper secondary school. Importantly, the class gap reappears at the master’s level, with privileged students being more likely to pursue a master’s degree than less privileged students. The size of the class gap is remarkable, given that this gap is found among a selected group of university enrolees. As other studies have found that educational expansion in higher education is not necessarily a remedy for narrowing the class gap in educational attainment, scholars need to pay more attention to keeping disadvantaged students from leaving higher education.

scholarly journals Cognitive and brain development is independently influenced by socioeconomic status and polygenic scores for educational attainment

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (22) ◽  
pp. 12411-12418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Judd ◽  
Bruno Sauce ◽  
John Wiedenhoeft ◽  
Jeshua Tromp ◽  
Bader Chaarani ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Brain Development ◽  
Surface Area ◽  
Brain Structure ◽  
Parental Education ◽  
Cortical Surface ◽  
Cortical Surface Area ◽  
Regional Association ◽  
Polygenic Scores

Genetic factors and socioeconomic status (SES) inequalities play a large role in educational attainment, and both have been associated with variations in brain structure and cognition. However, genetics and SES are correlated, and no prior study has assessed their neural associations independently. Here we used a polygenic score for educational attainment (EduYears-PGS), as well as SES, in a longitudinal study of 551 adolescents to tease apart genetic and environmental associations with brain development and cognition. Subjects received a structural MRI scan at ages 14 and 19. At both time points, they performed three working memory (WM) tasks. SES and EduYears-PGS were correlated (r= 0.27) and had both common and independent associations with brain structure and cognition. Specifically, lower SES was related to less total cortical surface area and lower WM. EduYears-PGS was also related to total cortical surface area, but in addition had a regional association with surface area in the right parietal lobe, a region related to nonverbal cognitive functions, including mathematics, spatial cognition, and WM. SES, but not EduYears-PGS, was related to a change in total cortical surface area from age 14 to 19. This study demonstrates a regional association of EduYears-PGS and the independent prediction of SES with cognitive function and brain development. It suggests that the SES inequalities, in particular parental education, are related to global aspects of cortical development, and exert a persistent influence on brain development during adolescence.

Sibship size and educational attainment of Canadian baby boomers

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Dilmaghani
Keyword(s):  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Baby Boomers ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Parental Education ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Baby Boom ◽  
Sibship Size ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Social Surveys ◽  
Female Baby

PurposeThe present study assesses how sibship size affects child quality as measured by educational attainment.Design/methodology/approachThe data are from the Canadian General Social Surveys (GSS) of 1986, 1990, 1994 and 1995. The sample is restricted to the individuals born in Canada between 1946 and 1965, that is, the baby-boom generation. In addition to controlling for parental education, the sibship size is instrumented by a non-binary variable created based on the sex composition of the sibship. While most previous studies have pooled both genders, the present paper produces by gender estimatesFindingsThe OLS estimates are statistically significant, negative and moderately large for both male and female baby boomers. When the sibship size is instrumented, the estimates indicate that one additional sibling had reduced the educational attainment of male baby boomers by almost half a year. No causal effect for the sibship size is found for female baby boomers.Originality/valueThis is the first paper on the effects of sibship size on educational attainment, using Canadian data.

scholarly journals The Political Knowledge of University Students (A Comparative Study between Jordan and Libya)

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 13
Author(s):  
Alfeetouri Salih Mohammed Alsati ◽  
Al-Sayed Abd ulmutallab Ghanem
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Parental Education ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The University

The current research aims at identifying and measuring the political knowledge of the students of the two universities of Al- Balqaa in Jordan and Omar Al- Mokhtar in Libya. The two communities are almost similar in terms of the social formation, Arab customs and traditions, the Bedouin values, the difference in the institutional age and the political stability.The study attempts to measure and compare the political knowledge in the communities of the two universities using the descriptive and comparative analytical method. The study uses a 400 random questionnaire of 30 paragraphs to measure eight indicators divided into internal and external political knowledge, and other aspects of knowledge: general political knowledge, knowledge of the political institutions and leaders, the political interest, the geographical and historical knowledge, and knowledge of the methods of exercising the political process. The study also attempts to identifying the most important sources and the role of the university in university students’ political knowledge.The results show that the level of the political knowledge is medium while its level in the sample of the Jordanian students is high. According to the samples, the internal political knowledge is more than the external knowledge with a lack of interest in the political matters. The samples do not consider the political matters as their priorities. The political knowledge as a whole needs to much effort to be exerted to confront the current circumstances. The variables of the place of resident, age and the educational level make big difference in the political knowledge. In contrast, the level of the parental education does not create big differences.

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