Human developmental ecology and the possible confounding effects of the environment in academic merit
Ecological factors – particularly during development – shape the opportunities that individuals have to develop and fully engage with educational skills that support the realisation of individuals’ full (academic) potential (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998). This, in the short-, mid- and long-terms can have important consequences to individuals’ opportunities to progress in their tertiary education (e.g., PhD), acquiring supportive network of peers and mentors, and securing jobs in academia (Björklund & Salvanes, 2011; Helin et al., 2019). Socioeconomic status is perhaps one of the most studied ecological factors of the ecosystem of individuals, and one which possess a large amount of data from governments and NGOs; I shall therefore focus on socioeconomic status as an example (‘proof-of-concept’), but the arguments are applicable to all aspects of the ecological context of individuals. A longitudinal study in the US has shown that children growing in poverty have significantly lower academic achievements as measured by scores in standardised tests (Hair, Hanson, Wolfe, & Pollak, 2015). This is evidence that poverty decreases the immediate opportunities for education in the environment of a developing individual (e.g., lack of educational resources, motivation) [see e.g., (Gorski, 2017)], that can translate into mid- and long-term access to opportunities to further education (Johnson, Riis, & Noble, 2016). Other ecological comorbidities of poverty such as poor health (Wickham, Anwar, Barr, Law, & Taylor-Robinson, 2016), stress (Blair & Raver, 2016), violence (Aber, 1994; Hashima & Amato, 1994), social discrimination that leads to further academic disengagement (Osypuk, Schmidt, Kehm, Tchetgen, & Glymour, 2019; Verkuyten, Thijs, & Gharaei, 2019) interact to further reinforce the unfavourable nature of the ecological context. Over time, the consequences of such unfavourable ecological factors can cumulate and strongly disfavour individuals’ opportunities to academic achievements (Black et al., 2017; Bronfenbrenner, 1995; Chan, Lake, & Hansen, 2017; Daelmans et al., 2017; Lo, Das, & Horton, 2017; Shonkoff, Radner, & Foote, 2017). Of course, the opposite side of this story is also true, and children developing in favourable ecological conditions have far more and better opportunities to fully engage with educational material, concentrate on mastering academic skills, networking, and so on. As a result, these individuals are surrounded by an environment far better – both in quality and also in quantity – of opportunities than those individuals from poverty (Battle & Lewis, 2002; White, 1982), leading to large cumulative differences between the academic achievements of individuals on different sides of this socioeconomic spectrum. In this context, one can ask: to what extent are individuals different in academic potentialper se ? Is it fair to expect an individual to be as competitive as other given strikingly different developmental environments from which these individuals have been shaped throughout their lives?
An additional problem is that in the UK at least, poverty is not independent of ethnicity (https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/demographics/people-living-in-deprived-neighbourhoods/latest) or gender ( https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/articles/persistentpovertyintheukandeu/2015#:~:text=1.,to%20roughly%204.6%20million%20people.&text=A%20higher%20proportion%20of%20women,data%20became%20available%20in%202008), whereby non-white and/or females are less favoured. It is at least intriguing that non-white and/or females are the same groups that have been historically denied access to education as well as to academic positions. On average, some groups have historically been more likely to experience ecological factors that nourish and develop (academic) skills compared to other groups and this, I shall argue, likely contributes at least partly to some groups’ success in securing goods in the current academic system. Note that, the rules by which distributive goods are allocated have themselves been historically shaped by individuals in high academic positions, namely, the privileged. This forges a self-perpetuating process which on the hand, selects individuals that experienced favourable ecological conditions and on the other hand, forges and enforces rules that guaranteed that individuals that experienced these favourable ecological conditions continue to receive support in the next generations. As George Orwell puts it:
“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”
[page 115, (Orwell, 1945)]
In the academic context, this can be paraphrased to read ‘all scientists are equal but some are more equal than others.’ Of course, I shall be careful here because these relationships can be nothing but spurious correlations between unrelated variables. For instance, the fact that poverty is unevenly distributed across ethnicities may not have any association with the lack of academic opportunities to individuals from low socioeconomic background or underrepresented ethnicities. The lack of diversity and equality in academia can, in theory, be caused by other factors. This will only be truly uncovered with data, and this is one of the values of this paper: to stimulate further empirical work on the topic. I nevertheless shall proceed based on the assumption founded on recent data which suggests an association between an individuals’ ecological context and the academic opportunities that these individuals can attain [see e.g., (Helin et al., 2019)].