Unequal Luck: Chance as a Mechanism of Educational Inequality

Sociology has paid limited attention to the role of luck in shaping individualsocioeconomic outcomes. This study examines how luck, conceptualized as chance eventsthat provide or deplete resources for educational attainment, contributes to educationalinequalities by family socioeconomic status (SES). We theorize that unexplainedvariance in regression models can serve as an indirect indicator of both good and badluck. Building on the Breen and Goldthorpe model of educational inequality, weintroduce a stochastic component and derive a novel hypothesis: luck plays a greaterrole, and thus generates more variability in outcomes, when structural resources andindividual propensity for education are misaligned, specifically for low-SES students withhigh educational propensity and high-SES students with low propensity. We test thishypothesis using variance function regression models with sibling fixed effects on twoU.S. datasets. The results support our expectations: educational outcomes are mostvolatile when parental SES and educational propensity diverge, particularly among low-SES students with high propensity, whose attainment appears most exposed to chance.We conclude by discussing implications for the emerging sociology of luck and forresearch on inequality and mobility more broadly.