Noel P. Gist

Scholastic Achievement and Occupation

I Problem and Method. Any study of vocations in American society must necessarily proceed from the demonstrable fact that something ap* preaching an occupational hierarchy exists, that specialized occupations carry with them varying degrees of social and economic status, and that their assignment to positions on the occupational scale reflects in a general way the prestige, or lack of it, which society attaches to the different tasks performed. Because this conception of the occupational pyramid represents essentially a set of social values which not only undergoes changes but which also varies from group to group, no very precise delineation of it can be achieved. Yet it is a social phenomenon of much importance, for the value-judgments placed on occupations do influence the lives and activities of every person in our culture. As a corollary to this stereotype of the occupational pyramid is the fairly common belief that intelligence is in some way related to occupation, that those occupations which are accorded relatively high prestige tend to attract intellectually superior persons, and that the low-prestige and low-income tasks represent the vocational channels into which individuals of lesser ability are inclined to drift. This popular notion of the relationship between ability and occupational status has received considerable confirmation from numerous scientific studies. Yet the methodology employed in these investigations may be seriously open to doubt because usually they have dealt not with the individuals in given occupations but rather with their children. What they have shown, for the most part, is that children whose ftahers are identified with the high-prestige and high-income occupations have on the average a higher measured intelligence than children whose fathers are lower down the occupational scale. It is known, of course, that the measured intelligence of soldiers in the first World War showed gradations of ability from the professions to unskilled labor, but in this instance the individuals were adults who had already been conditioned by their own occupational experiences. In the present report the writers have sought to avoid some of the imperfections of methodology characteristic of most of the earlier studies by ascertaining what relationship exists between the abilities of the individual as measured during adolescence and the occupation which he