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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?

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.