Educational attainment: Success to the successful

Abstract

Systems archetypes are patterns of structure found in systems that are helpful in understanding some of the dynamics within them. The intent was to examine educational attainment data using the success-to-the-successful archetype as a model to see if it helps to explain the inequality observed in the data. Findings indicated that this archetype is useful in explaining the variation, and there are several other terms and concepts that are helpful as well as the terms / concepts: success-to-the successful, the rich get richer, Pareto’s law, Zipf’s law, and power law distributions are related and sometimes used interchangeably.