Economic inequality and academic perseverance: Evidence from 73 countries.

BACKGROUND: Academic perseverance is important for educational success, yet research has focused mainly on individual and proximal environmental factors, with limited attention to broader socioeconomic contexts. AIMS: This study examined whether national economic inequality was associated with students' academic perseverance and whether this association varied by family socioeconomic status (SES). SAMPLES: Data were drawn from four Programme for International Student Assessment cycles conducted in 2000, 2012, 2018 and 2022, comprising 1,374,393 15-year-old students from 73 countries. METHODS: Economic inequality was indexed using lagged national Gini coefficients. Country-level correlations and three-level weighted multilevel models were estimated, with students nested within schools and countries. Models adjusted for GDP per capita, population, unemployment, gender, age and immigrant background. Cross-level Gini × SES interactions tested moderation by family SES. RESULTS: Economic inequality was moderately to strongly positively correlated with country-level mean academic perseverance across the four waves (r = .47-.61). In multilevel models, higher national inequality was also associated with higher individual-level academic perseverance after adjustment for covariates, explaining approximately 1% of the variance. The Gini × SES interaction was significant in three of the four waves: the positive association was approximately 1.5-1.8 times stronger among lower-SES students than among higher-SES students. CONCLUSIONS: Economic inequality was associated with greater academic perseverance, particularly among lower-SES students. These findings suggest that its educational correlates may be more complex than uniformly negative accounts imply and warrant further research into the underlying mechanisms and longer-term consequences.