Does Having Peers With Highly Educated Parents Increase a Student's Chances of Entering Selective University Programs?

The study asks whether having more classmates whose parents hold advanced degrees increases a student’s chances of entering highly selective university programs. Using Norwegian administrative data that follow students from middle school through early adulthood, the authors link each student to detailed records on peers, parents, grades, university enrollment, and earnings. They find that a one–standard deviation increase in exposure to such peers raises selective-degree enrollment by about 2.6 percentage points overall, with effects roughly three times larger for students from highly educated families. Peer exposure also slightly lowers GPA for low-SES students but still increases their likelihood of applying to selective programs.

The Policy Scientist's Perspective

This article examines a question with broad implications for equity and social justice: whether the makeup of students’ high-school peer networks influences access to highly selective university programs and, ultimately, patterns of intergenerational mobility. This matters because even in systems with low tuition and centralized admissions, large gaps in opportunity persist across socioeconomic groups. The use of comprehensive Norwegian administrative data provides strong internal validity, and the quasi-experimental design improves causal credibility. The findings are likely relevant for other countries with similar structures and offer a timely addition to the literature by clarifying mechanisms that link peer environments to long-run educational stratification.

Full Citation and Link to Article

Cattan, S., Salvanes, K. G., & Tominey, E. (2025). First Generation Elite: The Role of School Social Networks. American Economic Review. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?from=f&id=10.1257%2Faer.20230582 

Central Research Question

The central question examined in this study is whether exposure to peers whose parents hold elite university degrees causally influences a student’s probability of entering highly selective university programs, and if so, through which mechanisms this influence operates. The authors seek to isolate two channels: how elite-peer exposure affects high-school GPA, and how it separately shapes application behavior conditional on GPA. Because Norway’s higher education system lacks tuition barriers and legacy admissions, the paper asks why socioeconomic disparities in elite university admission persist, and whether peer-network composition plays a measurable causal role in perpetuating intergenerational inequality.

Previous Literature

This work builds on three strands of research. First, it contributes to the literature on intergenerational mobility and the role of social capital. Earlier work by Chetty and colleagues shows that cross-class friendships predict upward mobility in the United States, and that elite institutions reproduce substantial socioeconomic advantage. Second, it engages the peer-effects literature, which explores how peer ability, behavior, and background influence academic outcomes. Prior studies often emphasize ability spillovers, yet provide little evidence on the distinct role of peers’ parental education as a form of status-linked capital. Third, the paper intersects with research on teacher bias and assessment regimes. Several studies note that teacher-assigned grades may embed stereotyping, either explicitly or implicitly, leading to systematic downgrading of disadvantaged students. This paper advances the conversation by combining these literatures, identifying not only whether elite-peer exposure matters but decomposing the underlying channels. Its contribution lies in clarifying how status-linked peer networks shape educational trajectories in a system where structural barriers such as tuition or private schooling are minimal.

Data

The study uses rich Norwegian administrative microdata, which offer several strengths. First, the dataset spans nine cohorts of students moving from middle school to high school between 2002 and 2010, creating a sample of roughly 178,000 students across more than 550 schools. Second, it includes complete, linked records for parents and peers, including parental education, income, and occupation. Third, it links students to the full register of high-school grades, external exam scores, university applications, higher-education enrollment, and labor-market earnings into their early 30s. Fourth, peer groups are observed at the level of the entire high-school cohort within each school, allowing the researchers to construct a precise measure of exposure to elite-educated parents. Fifth, the data include both blindly graded national exams and teacher-graded assessments, enabling the authors to disentangle bias-related mechanisms from learning-related mechanisms. The dataset is unusually comprehensive, population-wide, and free from attrition, allowing for higher internal validity than typical survey-based research. While Norway differs from countries with private schooling and high tuition fees, the institutional features also create a cleaner environment for identifying social-network mechanisms without confounding financial factors.

Methods

The authors employ a quasi-experimental research design that exploits variation in elite-peer exposure across adjacent cohorts within the same high school. Because students with slightly different middle-school GPAs may fall above or below a school’s annual admissions threshold, the composition of each incoming cohort shifts in ways partly unrelated to any single student’s attributes. By conditioning on middle-school GPA and fixed characteristics of each school, the authors treat year-to-year fluctuations in the share of elite-educated parents as plausibly exogenous. They estimate linear models with school fixed effects, cohort fixed effects, and rich demographic controls.

To disentangle channels, they use two additional strategies. First, they examine the effect of elite-peer exposure on different components of GPA—externally scored written exams, teacher-assigned internal assessments, and oral examinations. This allows them to separate learning spillovers from grading bias and rank-based downgrading. Second, they employ an instrumental-variables strategy to estimate the effect of elite peers on elite-degree enrollment conditional on GPA. The instrument is the random assignment of students to sit for a mandatory high-stakes math exam scored by external graders. Because this lottery strongly shifts GPA but is uncorrelated with application behavior, it enables a causal decomposition into (1) an indirect GPA-mediated pathway and (2) a direct application-behavior pathway. This combination of within-school variation, administrative measurement, and quasi-randomized exam assignment yields stronger causal credibility than standard regression-based peer-effect studies.

Findings/Size Effects

The study produces five major findings. First, exposure to elite-educated parents in one’s high-school cohort significantly increases the probability of enrolling in an elite university program. A one-standard-deviation increase in elite-peer exposure raises elite-degree enrollment by about 2.6 percentage points for the average student. This effect is highly unequal: it is roughly three times larger for students from elite-educated families (around 4 percentage points) than for students from less-educated families (around 1.3 percentage points). Because high-SES students also have higher exposure levels, the authors estimate that peer-network segregation accounts for roughly 12 percent of the SES gap in elite-degree enrollment.

Second, elite-peer exposure decreases overall GPA. The effect is sharply stratified: low-SES students lose roughly 0.17 standard deviations in GPA per standard-deviation increase in elite-peer exposure, while high-SES students lose about 0.05 standard deviations. This decline, however, is not uniform across assessments. Exposure increases scores on externally graded written exams for all students, suggesting positive learning spillovers. The negative net effect stems from teacher-graded assessments, where downgrading is especially pronounced for low-SES students. The authors show that part of this pattern reflects rank-based grading dynamics—when more elite peers enter the cohort, many students fall in the classroom ranking—but even conditional on rank, low-SES students experience larger downgrades, consistent with teacher bias or differential evaluation.

Third, the instrumental-variables analysis shows that elite-peer exposure has a substantial positive effect on elite-degree enrollment conditional on GPA. For low-SES students, the direct effect is about 2.6 percentage points. This direct effect outweighs the negative GPA-mediated pathway, meaning that elite peers reduce teacher-graded performance but still increase the probability of applying to and entering selective programs. These behavioral effects likely operate through information, expectations, or shifts in perceived fit, though the data do not allow the authors to isolate which mechanism is dominant.

Fourth, exposure to elite peers increases early-career earnings. A one-standard-deviation increase in elite-peer exposure raises earnings rank at age 30–32 by roughly 1.4 percentiles for low-SES students and more than 3 percentiles for high-SES students. Elite-degree enrollment itself yields a large earnings premium, and the premium is similar for low- and high-SES students, indicating that first-generation entrants to elite programs receive returns comparable to their advantaged peers.

Fifth, the authors estimate intergenerational rank-rank relationships and show that elite-peer exposure increases mobility at the bottom of the parental income distribution while increasing persistence at the top. Simulations suggest that redistributing students across schools to reduce peer-network segregation would increase mobility across the income distribution.

Conclusion

This study provides compelling evidence that peer-network composition is an important mechanism through which educational advantage persists, even in a system with minimal financial barriers. The combination of administrative data, quasi-experimental variation in peer composition, and the randomized exam instrument strengthens the causal case. The results highlight that peer effects operate through both academic and behavioral pathways—elite peers simultaneously increase learning, reduce teacher-graded performance through ranking and bias, and increase selective-application behavior. Because the earnings premium to elite-degree entry is substantial and similar across SES groups, these mechanisms have lasting consequences for intergenerational mobility. Although Norway’s institutional context differs from systems with private schooling and tuition barriers, the findings likely generalize to countries where admissions are formally merit-based but socially stratified peer networks shape educational choices and trajectories.