Abstract
Racial disparities in achievement are a persistent fact of the US educational system. An often cited but rarely directly studied explanation for these disparities is that adolescents from different racial and ethnic backgrounds are exposed to different peers and have different friends. In this article I identify the impact of friends on racial and ethnic achievement disparities. Using data from Add Health and an instrumental variable approach, I show that the achievement characteristics of youths’ friends drive friend effects; adolescents with friends with higher grades are more likely to increase their grades compared to those with lower-achieving friends. Although these effects do not differ across race/ethnicity, given differences in friendship patterns, if black and Latino adolescents had friends with the achievement characteristics of white students, the GPA gap would be 17 to 19 percent smaller. Although modest, this effect represents an important and often overlooked source of difference among black and Latino youth.
Highlights
The Foundations of Friend InfluenceFriends affect the academic behaviors and outcomes of youth through two key pathways
This article has two goals: 1) to provide a causal estimate of the effect that friends have on academic achievement and 2) to connect these causal effects to patterns of racial and ethnic inequality in academic achievement
By helping each other with homework or sharing information about college, courses, or teachers, friends can help to improve academic outcomes and change educational behaviors (Crosnoe et al 2003). Both mechanisms are invoked in recent research studying friends and their role in the academic achievement and educational attainment of youth
Summary
The Foundations of Friend InfluenceFriends affect the academic behaviors and outcomes of youth through two key pathways. Having friends or peers with high levels of parental education increases the likelihood of enrolling in college (Choi et al 2008) and has a positive impact on grades in school (Fletcher, Ross, and Zhang 2013; Riegle-Crumb and Callahan 2009). Through both the creation of norms and the sharing of information, the academic and socioeconomic characteristics of adolescents’ friends are associated with achievement trajectories
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