Social Origins and Academic Performance at University

Abstract

The paper addresses the question of whether social class origin affects academic performance at university. Although a clear relationship between social origins and performance has been found at lower levels of the educational system, the much stronger selection of lower class students to higher education makes it unlikely that they should be less talented than students from higher class backgrounds. However, according to cultural capital theory, we would expect students from the families who are closest to the academic culture to have the greatest success. We study the impact of class origin on grades among practically all first-year students and higher-level graduates in Norwegian universities in the periods 1997 to 2002 and 1997 to 2003, respectively. Our analyses show that there is an association between class origin and academic performance, and that it is the students originating in classes that score high with respect to cultural capital that tend to receive the highest grades. This is true both for higher and lower level university studies, and in the majority of fields in our detailed analysis of 36 fields. The pattern of inequality is partly, but not fully, established in secondary level schooling.