Smith, J. (2014). The meritocracy bias: Do young Australians’ beliefs about academic success compound educational inequalities? (original) (raw)

TASA 2014 Refereed Conference Proceedings

Meritocratic ideals, which emphasise individual responsibility and self-motivation, have featured prominently and at times controversially in discourses about young Australians’ educational and occupational participation in recent years. This means that young people are often encouraged to attribute academic success to individual factors such as hard work and talent, and to blame failure on extrinsic factors such as luck, task difficulty, or broader structural advantages and disadvantages. Using longitudinal data on a large cohort (n=1,853) of young Queenslanders participating in the ‘Our Lives’ project, I analyse the relationship between attributions for academic success in the middle of high school (aged 14/15 years) and how they related to educational performance at the end of school (aged 16/17 years). The meritocratic belief that hard work would lead to academic success was widespread within the sample and positively associated with subsequent educational performance. However, most respondents also emphasized the importance of having a supportive family, despite this being negatively associated with performance. Consistent with claims about a ‘social inequality of motivation’, the findings also suggest that emphasising meritocracy may compound the educational disadvantages of respondents living in rural and regional Australia.