Dreaming big: Higher occupational aspirations from persistent and advantaged kids

This study examines how non-cognitive skills contribute to the limited mobility of occupational choice across generations within families. We explore this by investigating desired occupational choices of adolescents of an Australian nationally representative panel survey. The main contribution of this study is that we highlight the central role of the non-cognitive skill of ‘persistence’, linking childhood socioeconomic status (SES) inequalities to occupational ambitions. We identify that persistence is a crucial skill that develops in childhood, diverges by SES over time and is heavily rewarded in the labour market. It is also linked to occupational aspirations of children, potentially setting low and high SES children on different occupational paths for life. Our results show that children from high-SES backgrounds effectively pre-sort themselves into desired occupations requiring high levels of persistence. They do so by (a) preferring to have jobs later in life requiring high levels of persistence, regardless of their own level of persistence, and (b) actually acquiring higher levels of persistence throughout their childhood and adolescence, aligning with desired jobs based on both their own and required levels of persistence. There is a clear policy window at the age of 10/11, when high-SES and low-SES children start to systematically acquire different levels of persistence.