Luck and Educational Attainment

Abstract:
In decades of stratification research focused on social origins and individual merit as competing determinants of achievement, a class of events that may shape life outcomes—those occurring by chance—has received little systematic attention. We investigate the role of luck in educational attainment through in-depth interviews with 66 PhD students, oversampling individuals from non-college-educated families. We identify three recurring types of luck—institutional, coincidental, and erratic—each rooted in distinct unpredictability-generating mechanisms. Through a novel counterfactual measurement exercise, we also assess the significance of luck events reported by students. We find that first-generation students more often report consequential chance events. This class difference does not appear attributable to divergent understandings of luck. These findings point to luck as a significant and underrecognized factor in processes of social mobility.In decades of stratification research focused on social origins and individual merit as competing determinants of achievement, a class of events that may shape life outcomes—those occurring by chance—has received little systematic attention. We investigate the role of luck in educational attainment through in-depth interviews with 66 PhD students, oversampling individuals from non-college-educated families. We identify three recurring types of luck—institutional, coincidental, and erratic—each rooted in distinct unpredictability-generating mechanisms. Through a novel counterfactual measurement exercise, we also assess the significance of luck events reported by students. We find that first-generation students more often report consequential chance events. This class difference does not appear attributable to divergent understandings of luck. These findings point to luck as a significant and underrecognized factor in processes of social mobility.