Educational attainment: Success to the successful

Systems archetypes are patterns of structure found in systems that are helpful in understanding some of the dynamics within them. The intent was to examine educational attainment data using the success-to-the-successful archetype as a model to see if it helps to explain the inequality observed in the data. Findings indicated that this archetype is useful in explaining the variation, and there are several other terms and concepts that are helpful as well as the terms / concepts: success-to-the successful, the rich get richer, Pareto’s law, Zipf’s law, and power law distributions are related and sometimes used interchangeably.Systems archetypes are, as Senge (2006) noted, patterns of structure found in artificial, natural, and social systems. These archetypes, few in number, provide a toolkit for thinking about social systems such as corporations, government agencies, military organizations, and educational institutions, among others. These archetypes are helpful in understanding patterns of structure within systems. This article considers one specific archetype, success-to-the-successful (STS), to examine educational attainment level in the United States.Meadows (2008) described STS as competition for resources. Whether in business, education, or even ecology; those who are successful attaining the most resources tend to expand their success further and further, sometimes at the expense of those who have minimal resources. In business, leaders use knowledge, experience, and organizational politics to expand their success.Meadows provides an example of the game of Monopoly that resembles business success where players compete to buy property and expand hotels that bring more and more success as the game continues. In education, how successful students are depends on availability of resources to expand knowledge, including availability of quality schools and teachers, personal desire to learn, financial status, and family and community support. In ecology, animals compete for food and safety to determine which animal rises to the success of the successful status. All walks of life compete for resources and those who are the successful will have more resources to continue to be more and more successful