The Total Effect of Social Origins on Educational Attainment. Meta-Analysis of Sibling Correlations from 18 Countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The sibling correlation (SC) estimates the total effect of family background, or 'social origins,' and may be interpreted as measuring a society’s inequality of opportunity. Its sensitivity to both observed and unobserved factors makes it an all-encompassing measure and an attractive choice for comparative research. We gather and summarise all available estimates of SCs in educational attainment (M = .46, SD = .09), before employing meta-regression to explore variability in these estimates. First, we find significantly lower SCs in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark than the US, with US correlations on the order of 0.1 -- or 25% -- higher. Most of the other (primarily European) countries for which we find estimates fall in between. Second, we find a novel Great Gatsby Curve-type positive association between income inequality in childhood and the SC, both cross-nationally and within countries over time. This supports theoretical accounts of the Great Gatsby Curve that emphasize the role of educational inequality as a link between economic inequality and social immobility, and implies that greater equality of educational opportunity likely requires a reduction in economic inequality. Additionally, we find that correlations between sisters are modestly higher on average, and we find no overall differences between cohorts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.104 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".