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)].