Nutritional status does not show any correlation with absenteeism from school, failure to do homework, or attending preschool. The model does not incorporate these academic inputs, because doing so would have rendered estimation intractable. But the findings on parents' reading time suggest that the study's results underestimate the direct effect of malnutrition on achievement. Because we would expect greater reading to improve the achievement scores of malnourished children, without this compensation test scores would have been even lower. Clearly, improving nutrition in such an environment should produce important educational gains.
Parental behavior compensates for only a little of malnutrition's deleterious effects on learning.
Delaying entry into primary school improves achievement and reduces the rate of first-grade repetition, but not enough to overcome the effects of malnutrition in infancy. As the Bhargava study points out, once poor nutrition diminishes a student's ability to grasp abstract concepts, the learning situation is sure to deteriorate even further. Undernourished children are increasingly likely to drop out of school as adolescents, when concepts learned in school become more abstract. In other words, only the better-nourished adolescents are likely to benefit from resources devoted to secondary and higher education. And children who have dropped out of school after only a few primary grades are unlikely to be able to pursue skilled occupations.