Who You Grow Up With: How School Peers Unlock the Elite

Who you grow up with may matter as much as how hard you study. Norwegian evidence suggests that exposure to peers in high school play a decisive role in shaping access to elite education and, ultimately, economic mobility.

Higher education, particularly elite degrees, is important because of its high labour market returns. However, high socioeconomic segregation at elite undergraduate and graduate education levels further reinforces socioeconomic inequality. Interestingly, this is also true for countries with relatively low levels of socioeconomic inequality. For example, in Norwegian elite higher education institutions, students from high-income families are seven times as prevalent as those from the lowest-income families (bottom quintile).

Based on Norwegian data, a research article by Cattan et al. (2025) studies how exposure to peers from elite-educated families in high school affects students’ enrolment in elite higher education institutions. The authors draw on the concept of economic connectedness in friendship networks, which has been shown to be positively correlated with upward mobility (Chetty et al., 2022). Theoretically, having connections with more educated or well-resourced individuals has shown to be important for transferring information, affecting motivation and providing mentorship or job referrals. Empirically, these connections were shown to shape economic and labor market outcomes.

• Even though parents’ incomes are not useful for predicting children’s income, there is high intergenerational education persistence meaning parents’ education strongly predicts children’s education (Bütikofer et al., 2021).

  The higher education system is predominantly public: 98% of university students attend public institutions, and private institutions also receive government funding.

  Elite higher education includes 5-year bachelor/master’s degrees in law, medicine, and STEM obtained in the best institutions of the country.

  High school GPA is a weighted average of (1) blindly assessed written exams, (2) teacher-assessed internal grades, and (3) oral exams assessed jointly by the student’s teacher and an external examiner. The blindly assessed exams are randomly assigned to third-year high school students based on a lottery.

  In Norway’s centralized admission system, access to higher education is primarily determined by (i) students’ GPA and (ii) their ranked program preferences.

• Elite peers (students with at least one parent educated at an elite institution) may motivate students from non-elite backgrounds (whose parents did not attend elite universities) to become high achievers and help them to be more effective in their studies.
• Elite peers and their parents might expand non-elite students’ information set on programs, their advantages and expected returns to them. Conditional on achieving a sufficiently high GPA, this may increase the likelihood that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds apply to elite programs.
• On the other hand, elite peers could distort teachers’ assessment based on a curve as a high proportion of elite students creates downward pressure on the rank of other students. Additional distortion may arise from implicit bias of teachers.

⇒ Thus, it is not clear whether elite peers have a net positive or negative effect on the enrollment of students from non-elite backgrounds in elite higher education institutions. Importantly, children from non-elite backgrounds are much less likely to be exposed to elite peers than children from elite backgrounds.

Having analyzed a panel of 9 cohorts of students who graduated from middle school between 2002 and 2012, these are the important findings:

1) Elite peers positively influence the probability of enrolling in an elite degree conditional on GPA. Numerically, a one-standard-deviation increase in the proportion of elite educated parents in a school-cohort leads to a 2.6 percentage point increase in the likelihood that students in this school-cohort enroll in an elite degree. Moreover, this effect is three times larger for students with at least one parent who has completed an elite degree (high SES) than for those whose parents have not (low SES).

2) It was found that the overall GPA is negatively affected by elite peers.

• In the teacher assessed exam components of GPA, there is a four times larger negative effect of elite peers on low SES students’ grades compared to high SES students’ grades. This could be explained by teachers’ relative grading, or marking on a curve in other words: a bigger number of high achieving elite students could push other students’ grades downward, with lower ranked students feeling this effect more strongly than higher ranked students.
• Besides, there could be (1) a systematic teacher bias against low SES students; (2) high SES students could be more academically “able” even conditional on their middle school GPA; or (3) low SES students’ skills could be affected by the elite peers higher proportion and lead to downgrade in the teacher assessment.
• In contrast, blindly assessed exam results, considered the cleanest measure of learning or knowledge, are positively affected by elite peers. This finding points to positive spillovers of elite peers on the study efforts and aspirations of other students.

3) The average earnings premium from enrolling in an elite degree, computed using earnings at ages 30–32, is similar for both low and high SES students:

• There is a very high average earnings premium to enrolling in an elite degree. And it is only slightly smaller for low than high SES students.
• There is no statistically significant effect of exposure to elite peers on entering the top earnings percentile for both low and high SES students. However, elite peers increase the chance of earning in the top decile (for high SES students), top quartile and the top half of the income distribution, and the effect is greater for high than low SES students.

In general, exposure to elite peers positively affects low SES students and indeed increases the number of first-generation elites. This is about increased mobility at the bottom of the parental income distribution. On the other hand, high SES students experience a greater impact of elite peers, which is about exacerbated lack of mobility at the top of the parental income distribution.

 As Cattan et al. (2025) argue, social capital is a key factor underlying the persistence of socioeconomic segregation and the low representation of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in elite education, or in other words, low number of first-generation elites. Important implications are (1) social mixing of students with parents of different education levels and (2) standardized, blindly assessed tests. Both might be beneficial for social upward mobility of low SES students through increased benefits of interactions with their elite peers and more accurate grade assessment of high-ability low SES students.

Cattan, S., Salvanes, K. G., & Tominey, E. (2025). First-Generation Elite: The Role of School Social Networks. American Economic Review 115(12), pp. 4369–4403.

Chetty, R., Jackson, M. O., Kuchler, T., Stroebel, J., Hendren, N., Fluegge, R. B., ... & Wernerfelt, N. (2022). Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility. Nature, 608(7921), 108-121.

Butikofer, A., E. Risa, and K. G. Salvanes (2021). Status traps and human capital investment.