The gender gap in education is less talked about than many other achievement gaps, but it persists. Girls and women are more likely to finish high school, more likely to go to college, more likely to complete college, and consistently score higher on verbal standardized tests than their male counterparts. Even on math assessments, females have mostly closed the gender gap: NAEP scores show similar fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade math scores going back to 1990, although boys had a slim edge in some years. Since boys and girls have similar average IQ scores, girls’ superior academic performance may be due to stronger non-cognitive skills, such as conscientiousness and discipline.
A new NBER working paper posits a policy mechanism that may improve non-cognitive skills in boys and help them close the college enrollment gap with girls. Using data for students who were enrolled in fifth grade in a large school district in Florida from 2003–2012, economists David Card, Eric Chyn, and Laura Guiliano show how advanced programs for students, often called “gifted” programs, can have outsized effects for boys.
The study focuses on the effects of gifted programs on students from low-income families and English learners. In the (unnamed) school district being studied, all students are screened for gifted programs via an IQ test, but the threshold for identification is lower for these disadvantaged students than for others: Students from low-income families and English learners must reach a score of 116, which is about the 85th percentile of the entire student distribution. (For other students, the threshold is an IQ of 130, limiting the programs to about 3 percent of students.) Identified students received a range of services, often including a few hours per week of special instruction, and many of the students were placed in specialized gifted classrooms in fourth and fifth grades.
The study’s main finding is that the gifted program has a large effect on boys’ college-going but no such effect on girls. Seventy-four percent of boys who met the IQ cutoff attended college, compared to just 46 percent of those who narrowly missed it. This is a powerful effect that eliminates the gender gap in college enrollment. To explain this long-term effect, the researchers examine shorter-term outcomes such as test scores, advanced course enrollment, disciplinary actions, and grades.
They divide these shorter-term outcomes into “cognitive” and “non-cognitive” outcomes. Test scores fall into the cognitive category, while course enrollment, suspensions, and GPA are measures of non-cognitive skills. This classification is somewhat simplistic, as both cognitive and non-cognitive skills likely contribute to all measured outcomes. Test scores, for example, are influenced by non-cognitive factors, while GPA and enrollment in advanced courses are typically at least somewhat related to students’ knowledge, as well as other cognitive factors.
When the researchers examine the effects of the gifted programs on these shorter-term outcomes, they find that while the program has a strong positive effect on boys’ advanced course enrollment and a small positive effect on grade point average (GPA), it has no discernible effect on student test scores, regardless of gender. None of the test scores the researchers examine, from elementary tests through the tenth grade PSAT, appear to rise as a result of being in the gifted program. That the gifted students earn similar grades even though they enroll in more advanced classes could indicate that they are outperforming their peers, although grade inflation in advanced courses could also be a factor. Based on their cognitive/non-cognitive dichotomy, the researchers interpret the unchanged test scores as evidence that the effect on boys’ college-going cannot be because of improving their cognitive skills, but instead must be influencing boys’ non-cognitive skills.
That argument is not entirely satisfying, especially if non-cognitive skills are understood to include traits like conscientiousness, grit, and self-discipline. After all, the strongest effects of the gifted program are on course selection, and there is no statistically significant effect on suspensions, which is the most obviously “behavioral” of the study’s intermediate measures. Moreover, we might expect increased non-cognitive skills to show up on the tests anyway, since test-taking requires such skills, including patience.
Alas, another explanation for increased college-going would suggest that this is not about “skills” at all. Instead, it’s possible that the gifted students are being socialized differently. Many of the boys who participate in the gifted program may be adopting a college-going mentality as they are exposed to college prep coursework, different teachers, and higher-performing—and likely more affluent—peers. The affluence gap in college-going is large, too: Students from the most affluent quintile attend four-year institutions at more than three times the rate of students in the least affluent quintile. If the low-income and English learner gifted boys end up taking AP courses alongside more affluent students, it may just result in them feeling like college is the obvious next step after high school, leading to their higher enrollment rates irrespective of their skills, cognitive or non-cognitive.
The paper demonstrates that this gifted program alters the academic trajectories of the boys who participate: They take special classes, continue in more advanced classes, earn slightly higher grades, have higher-achieving peers, and then go to college at higher rates than similar students who aren’t in the program. With so many boys adrift and failing to launch, this is certainly promising. Yet enrolling in college is not itself a measure of success. For college to be worth it, students need to gain valuable knowledge and skills and, ideally, complete a degree without taking on crushing debt. When the researchers are able to identify such success in college, no one will be able to deny that these programs can be truly life-changing.
SOURCE: David Card, Eric Chyn, and Laura Giuliano, Can Gifted Education Help Higher-Ability Boys from Disadvantaged Backgrounds? No. w33282, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2024.
