| Stephen Morgan
Harvard University
Endogenous, contextual , or correlated: Does adolescent interaction mediate the effect of school inputs on learning outcomes?
FINAL REPORT: Educational Attainment and the Bayesian Dynamics of Expectation Formation.
Status socialization models of educational attainment, as exemplified by the Wisconsin model of educational attainment, are centered upon a belief formation mechanism - the construction of expectations for future behavior through individual self-reflection and in response to the expectations of significant others. This mechanism, although intriguing in its suggestion that educational attainment can be changed by simply changing one's own expectation of future behavior, is too coarse to adequately characterize the observed relationships between educational expectations and subsequent educational attainment. The standard decision tree model that is the foundation of rational choice models of educational attainment has its comparative advantage in its specificity. As commonly deployed, however, rational choice models of educational attainment are bereft of mechanisms for the construction of the parameters of the decision trees on which individuals purportedly act in making decisions.
In this dissertation, I construct the first pieces of a new model of educational attainment that, from my perspective, borrows and then extends the most useful pieces of status socialization and rational choice models of educational attainment. The key innovation of the framework is the specification of a stochastic decision tree - a simple forward-looking decision tree with fundamentally stochastic parameters. When a sequential decision rule is invoked to characterize the manner in which individuals draw forecasts of future behavior from their stochastic decision trees, it can be shown that two important features - accuracy as well as precision - of the information on which beliefs are based can have separate effects on forecasts of future behavior.
If it is the case, as assumed by status socialization theory, that current behavior is a function of beliefs about the future, then forecasts of future behavior will operate as self-fulfilling prophecies by regulating commitment in current behavior to the course of behavior that is forecasted. If students base their forecasts of their future educational attainment on a set of cognitive processes that are adequately represented by a stochastic decision tree, then those students whose stochastic decision trees strongly identify a high level of educational attainment as in their best interest are more likely to obtain high levels of educational attainment in their futures.
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