The role of self-stereotypes in perpetuating educational inequalities
What is your research about?
Participation in higher education (HE) is starkly unequal along socioeconomic lines in many countries, including the UK, and COVID-19 has exacerbated such inequalities. Increasing the HE participation of excluded groups could greatly benefit intergenerational mobility and economic growth. But several education access policies have failed to reach their intended objectives because many talented disadvantaged students do not take up the opportunities they are offered.
We will investigate how individuals' self-image and self-stereotypes may prevent access to educational opportunities, leading to a perpetuation of income segregation. We will investigate self-stereotypes in the context of a preferential university admission policy in Chile targeted at disadvantaged students (PACE), which recent work has shown to suffer from low take-up. The Chilean context is particularly helpful given the centralized admission system to universities, the availability of high-quality administrative data, and the applicant's deep context knowledge and well-established collaboration with government officials and civil servants. The project will address these questions:
- To what extent do self-stereotypes affect social interactions in school?
- How do self-stereotypes affect access to opportunities and the take-up of preferential admissions?
How will the Stone Centre grant help your research?
The Stone Centre grant will help us with the first part of the project, which is aimed at measuring self-stereotypes using an innovative incentivized experiment, and investigating whether they correlate with the economic connectedness of students' social networks, which we will measure via surveys and school rosters.
What will you produce as part of your research?
We'll produce two papers. One will describe the self-stereotype measures we'll collect through the lab-in-field experiment and how they correlate with students' SES> The other paper will present the results of the randomized experiments, which will test interventions aimed at tackling self-stereotypes and evaluate how their impacts vary with the stereotypes measured at baseline.
> A working paper is available online.
> We explain some results of our research in the Times Higher Education.
As we will link any data we collect through surveys and through the lab-in-the-field experiment to administrative records, the result of this project will be a unique dataset that will allow us to follow the research participants throughout their lives.
We could also produce related education materials in CORE Econ style, for example:
- an Insight on non-monetary barriers to education, in particular, stereotypes,
- lecture slides and interactive visualisations, especially in light of the data collected as part of this project,
- an Economist in Action-style video explaining our research.
About this grant
Title of the project: The role of self-stereotypes in perpetuating educational inequalities
Value of the grant: £20,000
Duration: November 2022 – ongoing
