“When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with,” noted the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut. “You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school.” I thought of Vonnegut’s observation after I read a new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research titled simply “Popularity.” Individuals’ social status in high school has a “sizable effect” on their earnings as adults, reported lead author Gabriella Conti of the University of Chicago: “We estimate that moving from the 20th to 80th percentile of the high-school popularity distribution yields a 10% wage premium nearly 40 years later.” Conti’s study is part of a wave of research looking at how our social experiences in school connect to our lives after graduation. “We’ve all wondered at times if high school determines who we become as adults, and now we have the empirical data to test that notion,” says Pamela Herd, an associate professor of public affairs and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Herd is a co-director of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, one of the largest and longest-running investigations of how lives unfold in high school and beyond. The study, funded by the National Institute on Aging, has followed more than 10,000 members of Wisconsin’s 1957 graduating class for over 50 years, beginning when they were seniors and continuing throughout the decades as they established careers, raised families and began their lives as retirees and grandparents. The Wisconsin program is the granddaddy of a generation of studies that are just now coming to fruition. They’re being joined by a slew of shorter-term studies conducted by psychologists, sociologists, economists and epidemiologists, researchers from varied fields who have all taken an interest in the high school years. “Social scientists are realizing that many of our adult outcomes can be traced back at least in part to our experiences in high school,” says Robert Crosnoe, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin and … Continue reading Does High School Determine the Rest of Your Life?