You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances • Hacker News Board

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#41

Post by knowtheory » Thu, May 28, 2015, 5:51 PM UTC

interlocutor wrote: post #31

reqres wrote: post #8

As somebody who's spent some time studying the impact of various levers (income, educational achievement, maternal education etc) on university/college enrolment I'd like to throw in an economist's perspective that the NY Times did not include in the chart. You may draw the conclusion from the chart that income prevents the poorest from attending university because they can't afford the fees. This is highly misleadin…

So is there no genetic component to this at all? I see parental income and educational achievement mentioned, but not parental genes. Kids who got got good genes from their parents are more likely to go to college. And the parents who gave the kids good genes are likely to have high income. Genetics is the most important ingredient here.

If that were the case you would expect to find that adoption did very weird things to educational attainment in families. And i can't find any evidence to assert that that's the case.

"Genetics is the most important ingredient here." is a pretty extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#42

Post by kquealy » Thu, May 28, 2015, 5:51 PM UTC

ffn wrote: post #25

jawns wrote: post #10

A lot of great comments here on the content and presentation. I'm really interested, also, in the technical aspects of how this was put together. For instance, the app was able to recognize the shape of the line I drew. On my first attempt, it correctly identified that my line was an S shape; then when I started fiddling around, it was able to identify that my line was (roughly) straight. I wonder what method they us…

Yeah, I was really interested too. From what I can get from playing around in the console, they (probably jashkenas and his cronies) they're using d3 to do the rendering. Since d3 has convenient map / filter / reduce chains, I assume (though have no proof), they can figure out the shape of your line by doing ye olde' rise / run calculation for each point. If your slopes gets significantly bigger at some point, you mu…

Glad to see so much discussion of this here! Always cool to see our work on HN.

To answer this question, yes, we (Jeremy's cronies) are indeed using D3 to do most of the drawing and interactions. He also forced us to use Underscore.

The heat map showing everyone's responses is done in Canvas.

Hope that helps.

-KQ

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#43

Post by rahimnathwani » Thu, May 28, 2015, 5:51 PM UTC

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #18

tedsanders wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but your claim is ridiculous. $150K is not the minimum living wage for a family of four in SF. Plenty of families get by on less. Here is a map of incomes in SF: http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco-Califor... And here's a better map, though it doesn't seem to have household/family incomes: http://www.richblockspoorblocks.com/

If by "get by" you mean survive, then, certainly. But are they living a good comfortable life and are able to afford good food, a second car, good health insurance, good dental care, music lessons for the children, a decent family vacation and a well maintained house? Doubt it. Every hard working educated parent deserves this and being able to put their kids though college in a civilized society that the USA claims t…

"Every hard working educated parent deserves this..."

Why do they deserve this? And how do you define 'educated'? And who should provide these things if the market doesn't (i.e. how can it be fixed)?

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#44

Post by Yakimoto » Thu, May 28, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

stegosaurus wrote: post #30

So do we keep bikeshedding and tweaking little levers or do we actually try and fix the fundamental problem? I can't be the only one who is tired of seeing all of these snippets about small parts of a large system. We need to deal with wealth inequality. We live in a world... hell, we live in countries, in cities with 10 orders of magnitude wealth difference. A western person earns 10e6 - 10e7 over a lifetime, revenu…

>do we actually try and fix the fundamental problem? >I can't be the only one >We need to deal with wealth inequality.

Shill harder.

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#45

Post by Retric » Thu, May 28, 2015, 5:54 PM UTC

netcan wrote: post #34

reqres wrote: post #8

As somebody who's spent some time studying the impact of various levers (income, educational achievement, maternal education etc) on university/college enrolment I'd like to throw in an economist's perspective that the NY Times did not include in the chart. You may draw the conclusion from the chart that income prevents the poorest from attending university because they can't afford the fees. This is highly misleadin…

Another perspective on it is (one I think Americans are specifically averse to) is that these are all simply correlated to "class," for some definition for class. This is really another way of saying people follow in their parents footsteps. If you are born into a reference group (parents, uncles, etc.) where most people have children in their early 20s, you are more likely to as well^. It's expected and seems normal…

A lot of this relates to where people grow up. If nobody in your high school expects to go to college then that's a huge influence. Even something as simple as signing up for the SAT's is simply off the radar. Not to mention things like how much education your parent’s friends and coworkers have.

Income strongly correlates with zip code so it's hard to figure out the 'root' cause such things.

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#46

Post by jpereira » Thu, May 28, 2015, 5:55 PM UTC

kolbe wrote: post #23

reqres wrote: post #8

As somebody who's spent some time studying the impact of various levers (income, educational achievement, maternal education etc) on university/college enrolment I'd like to throw in an economist's perspective that the NY Times did not include in the chart. You may draw the conclusion from the chart that income prevents the poorest from attending university because they can't afford the fees. This is highly misleadin…

> The key to raising university enrolment among poor students is to provide better education/development opportunities and aspiration. I'm going to risk calling you out on this, because I think what goes unstated here is that public resources cannot compete with private ones when it comes to education. It's sad to look at Johnny Trust Fund, and see that he is born with a true educational leg up over poor children, an…

They solution I can see to this would be moving away from the conveyer-belt institution-and-teacher centric model of education which makes it impossible to distribute the same educational opportunities to all, solely because the money will attract the resources and teaching talen which will then be trapped within one institution.

If instead we had a model that allowed students to participate in an institituion independant network that created classess and assigned teachers based on smaller resource loads, week long classess as opposed to 2 year long courses, we could have a system that much more easily lends itself to individual needs and gives more freedom to all students regardless of income level. This same problem could also be tackled by bridging the teacher-student polarity. Students are very capable of teaching themselves in small groups and acheiving goals at the same rate as if they were with teachers. By removing the teacher from the model you reduce resource costs hugely.

Here students are giving by the system what they put in. By participating and working with multiple small groups of students we build social skills and open the door for more specialized and specific learning at every level, not just the private school. If the digital revolution needs to shake things up anywhere in education its in the model and class structure.

tl;dr:A system that gets rid of large classess and focuses on connecting students to teach themselves can provide the same(and highly effective) educational opportunities to all (at a very reasonable cost).

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#47

Post by rhino369 » Thu, May 28, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #26

rhino369 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only government subsidies that are worth anything are Pell grants and they phase out well below 150k. Also, they are limited to like 6k a year, way less than your 150k family can kick in. The elite private schools have a similar formula that sort of screws over these people. But you have no right to an elite education. Just go to Berkeley instead of Stanford or UVA instead of Duke.

Having had a kid accepted to UVA, UChicago and UC Berkely this year and being a resident of VA, I can tell you that board and tuition at UVA are still over 30K even for in-state. UChicago (a private shool) was the only one that gave a (quite generous, actually) merit grant.

Over 30 for in state seems too high. Tuition was 10k-12k 2 years ago.

http://admission.virginia.edu/admission/tuition

But congrats on your kid getting a merit scholarship at U of C. That's great and I'm sure you are very proud. I went of school and U of Illinois and Northwestern so I'm supposed to hate U of C, but it's a great school.

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#48

Post by thoth » Thu, May 28, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

tedsanders wrote: post #12

I hate being the typical negative commenter who points out that correlation doesn't equal causation, but in the case of this article I think it's warranted. Just because high-income families send kids to college more does not mean that high income causes it. A recent study of Swedish lottery winners showed that the kids of lottery winners did not do better on measures of health or education, suggesting that wealth do…

That may be true in Sweden, but perhaps there are other reasons that health and education aren't strongly correlated to wealth... for Sweden.

Sweden is famous for its public services (funded through high taxes), so their citizens receive free/low-cost health and education anyway. Thus, wealth isn't as big a factor for receiving those services as it is in other countries.

Pointing out correlation doensn't equal causation is fine, but drawing conclusion from another country and translating back to the U.S. while ignoring significant differences isn't correct either.

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#49

Post by curun1r » Thu, May 28, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

tedsanders wrote: post #14

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #9

If your family makes just above $150K per year in the US (not uncommon, especially in high cost of living areas like NYC, SF, DC, etc), you fall in the category where you have no "need" and according to some outdated government formula can afford the whole tuition, usually 20-60K per year. The reality, however, is that 150K is the minimum living wage for a family with two kids in a place like SF, and usually not enou…

No offense, but your claim is ridiculous. $150K is not the minimum living wage for a family of four in SF. Plenty of families get by on less. Here is a map of incomes in SF: http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco-Califor... And here's a better map, though it doesn't seem to have household/family incomes: http://www.richblockspoorblocks.com/

Living wage is different than the poverty line. I wouldn't be surprised if $150k was really tight for a family of 4 in SF proper.

Running the calculations, a payroll calculator indicates that $150k/yr turns into $3925 take home every 2 weeks or just over $100k/yr. The housing alone for a three bedroom (assuming everyone shares a room) would run at least $60k/yr. That leaves $40k/yr to support 6 people. That may be possible, but it's not easy and it's damn near impossible to be saving for college on that amount of money.

Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

#50

Post by enriquec » Thu, May 28, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

DarkTree wrote: post #35

kolbe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The key to raising university enrolment among poor students is to provide better education/development opportunities and aspiration. I'm going to risk calling you out on this, because I think what goes unstated here is that public resources cannot compete with private ones when it comes to education. It's sad to look at Johnny Trust Fund, and see that he is born with a true educational leg up over poor children, an…

That is an interesting point. I wonder what it would be like if any student could potentially attend any school based on their academic merit simply by making all private and public institutions free to attend if accepted. Of course, this is not realistic because private institutions would probably not exist and the wealthy have other upper-legs that are not related to tuition, such as professional-tutoring, geograph…

This is why I'm much more in favor of vouchers. From the papers I've read, its a less costly option, encourages/rewards parental involvement, and retains the freedom to choose (and the competition/movement that comes with it).

With vouchers applicable to private schools, you don't have to burden yourself with the entire cost or keep him in a school that he/she is not compatible with. At the very least, vouchers amongst public schools seems like a no brainer but I've met a lot of resistance from some friends that are teachers.