School Peers Boost Income and Career
Research
04.04.2025
ZEW Study on Long-Run Peer Effects in High School
Labour earnings increase if your schoolmates in your cohort were gritty, in other words persistent and passionate. A study conducted by ZEW Mannheim in collaboration with Cardiff Business School shows that being in a cohort with gritty schoolmates has a positive influence on one’s own success – even far beyond graduation and into adulthood. People from socially disadvantaged backgrounds in particular benefit from this effect. Data from around 6,000 former pupils at US high schools was analysed for this purpose. As peer influence on success extends across countries, this finding is relevant for Germany as well.
“Being gritty means to have a powerful motivation to achieve an objective. Grit is a personality trait that describes a person’s perseverance of effort combined with their passion for a particular long-term goal,” explains Effrosyni Adamopoulou, PhD, co-author of the study and deputy head of the ZEW’s Research Group “Inequality and Distribution Policy”. “It’s not just your own grit that influences your personal success in education and work. The grit shown by your social environment at school also has a decisive influence on your later life and career path. People from socially disadvantaged backgrounds in particular can benefit from this effect. A gritty peer group can help to overcome these hurdles.”
Bridge socioeconomic gaps through gritty peer group
The grittier a person is, the higher their annual gross earnings. This study finds that a student in the 83rd percentile of the grit distribution – meaning they are significantly more persistent and motivated than the average student – later earns 6.2 per cent more compared to an average student. Grit was measured using various questions from the underlying Add Health survey assessing traits like persistence and resilience, including the tendency not to give up easily.
The study also quantifies the influence of the peer group: If the peer group’s grit is in the 83rd percentile, the person’s annual gross earnings increase by 3.9 per cent compared to an average student. The peer group therefore has a significant influence on earnings later in life.
“It’s not just earnings later in life that increase with a gritty peer group at school. People with gritty schoolmates in their cohort are generally more satisfied with their later work and are more likely to have a job that matches their long-term career goals. Especially people with socially disadvantaged backgrounds can benefit from this and compensate for different starting conditions,” says study co-author Yaming Cao, researcher at the ZEW Research Unit “Labour Markets and Social Insurance”.
Data from 6,000 high school students
The study provides the first empirical evidence of the influence of so-called ”peer grit” on personal professional and financial success in later life. Grit refers to a personality trait characterised by perseverance and passion for a specific goal. The peer group refers to the social environment and in this context to schoolmates in the same cohort.
Representative data from around 6,000 former US high school students were analysed for the study. The students were surveyed during high school (between the ages of 12 and 19) and 15 years later after leaving school. Around two thirds of them, over 4.000 students in total, were also interviewed eight years after that. In this way, information about the school years and their impact on later life can be analysed. The data comes from various survey waves of the US long-term study Add Health in the period between 1994, 2009 and 2017.
