Wednesday 10 August 2022

The beauty premium and student grades for in-person and online education

The beauty premium is the idea that people who are more attractive are paid more in the labour market. I've posted on this topic many times and, although we usually focus on wages, the premium is not limited to the labour market. There is a small beauty premium in education as well (such that more attractive people receive better grades - see here). So, what happens to the beauty premium when education is moved from in-person (where there are many face-to-face interactions, and attractiveness might pay a relatively larger role in grades) to online (where students can hide behind Zoom with their cameras switched off, limiting 'face-to-face' interactions)?

That is the question that this new article by Adrian Mehic (Lund University), forthcoming in the journal Economics Letters (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online), addresses. Mehic uses data from the Industrial Engineering Programme at Lund University, and restricts his attention to the first two years of the programme, which is made up of 15 mandatory courses in mathematics, physics, computer science, business, and economics. He categorises mathematics and physics as quantitative subjects, and the others as non-quantitative (which would probably come as a surprise to most economists and computer scientists!). The sample includes 307 students, who commenced their studies sometime between 2015 and 2019, and experienced online study from the second semester of the 2019/20 academic year. That means that:

...students who started the program in 2018 had two online courses in their second year, whereas students starting in 2019 had two online courses in their first year, and eight online courses in their second year.

The attractiveness of each student was measured by asking 74 volunteers to rate the attractiveness of each student's ID photo on a scale of 1 (extremely unattractive) to 10 (extremely attractive), with each volunteer rating half of the sample. Then, looking at the relationship between attractiveness and grades overall, Mehic finds that:

When all courses in the program are considered, there is a positive, albeit statistically insignificant relationship between attractiveness and grades.

However, there is a difference between the 'quantitative' and 'non-quantitative courses', and:

...the coefficient for attractiveness is highly significant for the non-quantitative courses. The results suggest that one standard deviation higher beauty is associated with around 0.08σ higher grades. The magnitude of the estimated coefficient is slightly lower when the full set of controls is included. Concomitantly, there is no significant relationship between attractiveness and grades for the non-quantitative courses.

So, there is only a beauty premium for the non-quantitative courses, which Mehic explains may arise due to the following:

In our setting, the tasks faced by students in non-quantitative subjects, for instance in marketing and supply chain management, are likely to be seen as more ”creative”, and significantly contrast the more traditional book-reading and problem-solving in mathematics and physics courses, the latter presumably perceived as more monotonous. Together with the large use of group assignments in non-quantitative courses, these theoretical results imply that socially skilled individuals are likely to have a comparative advantage in non-quantitative subjects.

I'm not sure how much I buy that explanation, as Mehic includes computer science and economics in the non-quantitative courses, and (much as we may wish it was not true) most people would not characterise those subjects as 'creative', even relative to mathematics or physics.

Mehic then turns to a 'triple-differences' analysis, comparing the difference in the effect of beauty on grades between male and female students, and between online and in-person classes. He finds that:

...the triple interaction between Online, attractiveness, and the indicator for non-quantitative course is highly significant for female students. This finding suggests that the grades of female students deteriorated in non-quantitative subjects, with grades declining with attractiveness. There is no equivalent relationship for males.

So, the results show that there is a beauty premium, but the beauty premium exists only in the non-quantitative courses overall. Also, the shift to online teaching reduced the beauty premium for female students, but the beauty premium in non-quantitative courses was unaffected for male students. I could understand the beauty premium reducing for both male and female students, but it is difficult to understand why it may be that only the beauty premium for female students reduces in the online teaching mode. Mehic offers only that:

...relative to other students, attractive men are more successful in peer influence, and are more persistent, a personality trait positively linked to academic outcomes...

That seems really unconvincing to me. I think we're going to need a lot more research on this, before we can draw a firm conclusion on how the shift to online teaching has affected the beauty premium in education.

[HT: Marginal Revolution]

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