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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article bridges the literature on educational inequality between and within families to test whether high–socioeconomic status (SES) families compensate for low cognitive ability in the transition to secondary education in Germany. The German educational system of early-ability tracking (at age 10) represents a stringent setting for the compensatory hypothesis. Overall, previous literature offers inconclusive findings. Previous research between families suffers from the misspecification of parental SES and ability, while most within-family research did not stratify the analysis by SES or the ability distribution. To address these issues, I draw from the TwinLife study to implement a twin fixed-effects design that minimizes unobserved confounding. I report two main findings. First, highly educated families do not compensate for twins' differences in cognitive ability at the bottom of the ability distribution. In the German system of early-ability tracking, advantaged families may have more difficulties to compensate than in countries where educational transitions are less dependent on ability. Second, holding parents' and children's cognitive ability constant, pupils from highly educated families are 27% more likely to attend the academic track. This result implies wastage of academic potential for disadvantaged families, challenging the role of cognitive ability as the leading criterion of merit for liberal theories of equal opportunity. These findings point to the importance of other factors that vary between families with different resources and explain educational success, such as noncognitive abilities, risk aversion to downward mobility, and teachers' bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research suggests that beliefs about inequality are often biased in ways that serve people's own interests. By contrast, people might uphold system-justifying beliefs, such as meritocratic beliefs. We test these assumptions against real-life experience of highly selective university admission. Using panel data on German medical school applicants allows us to measure belief changes through experiences of success or failure in admission. We find support that self-serving bias in beliefs outweighs the motivation for system justification: success strengthens the belief that admission depends on effort, while failure reinforces the belief that admission depends on luck. These patterns partly manifest themselves in beliefs about societal inequality. Additionally, we argue that previous experiences (long-term experiences of social upbringing and short-term experiences in university admissions) provide a frame for new experiences, examine respective effect heterogeneity, and discuss implications of our findings of diverging paths in inequality beliefs of winners and losers for the persistence of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]