Selective schools with a higher average achievement level may exert a negative influence on students’ long-term success, finds a new longitudinal study of data from Project TALENT.
The nationally representative, longitudinal study of over 377,000 high school students found that while students who attend socioeconomically advantaged high schools tend to complete more schooling, earn higher annual incomes, and work in more prestigious jobs 11 and 50 years later, those who attend selective, high-achieving schools tend to experience the opposite.
The report, from the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that students in high-achievement schools, who might have been top students in a more academically diverse school, may develop a lower self-image when all of their classmates are high-achieving.
