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You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

nytimes.com

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

#31

Post by interlocutor »

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.

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

#32

Post by tikhonj »

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…

It's not clear that money per student is the metric that matters.

Parental involvement, for example, is crucial for motivating students, imparting various skills (ie time management, studying) and setting appropriate expectations[1]. This is more a matter of cultural and structural factors. Parents that have the time and motivation to care for their children's education could have a significant effect without worrying about per-student outlays.

Perhaps there's a way to replicate this by restructuring school to provide positive parent-like influences? I don't know, but it's not a matter of throwing money at the problem, one way or another.

[1]: I remember seeing a few studies on this. "Student Motivation: An Overlooked Piece of School Reform" looks like a reasonable overview of the subject: http://www.cep-dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=405#sth...

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

#33

Post by ninv »

I do not understand why poor people have kids. There should be a guideline for married couples, which tells them that if family income is less then 90K in NYC, you can not afford to have kids, if it is more than 120K then they can have one kid etc.

"Having kids" not for everyone. Kids degrade your lifestyle, drain you financially and limit your chances if you are poor. It's a SCAM.

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

#34

Post by netcan »

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. If you are born into reference group where educational achievement, college attendance, profession etc are within some band then you are more likely to find yourself in that band too.

If your reference group is a family and friends circle where college is a rarity, then attending college becomes overachieving. Most people are no overachievers. For others anything less than a top college, higher degree, top-of-your class is underachievement. People do what they feel is expected of them.

This is one of those things that people take for granted in individual cases (like their kids) but not at group levels. IE if you and your wife are highly educated, you expect that your kid will go to college. You don't think his chances are represented by national averages adjusted for income, race and intelligence.

^The parenthood point is a bit of a strange one because cultural shifts have been at work over the last few generations.

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

#35

Post by DarkTree »

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…

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, geographic location, and so on. I'm still curious how this would change the data though.

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

#36

Post by itsybitsycoder »

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…

I was surprised that nearly 95% of the children of the highest-income earners went to college, especially with everyone talking nowadays about all the good career options that don't require any college education at all. (Trade school, entrepreneurship, etc.) Then I thought about (what I believe to be) the typical person at very top of the income scale. Someone who has not only a lot of wealth in terms of money, but also reputation, connections, favors owed, etc. For a kid with parents like that, the easiest start for many of them may be to get a degree from a prestigious school and then have their parents call in some favors or sign on with the family business.

Lottery winners are in a totally different life situation from the rest of the wealthy, so I don't think lottery winner results are generally applicable like that.

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

#37

Post by twblalock »

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.

Can you provide any evidence for this assertion? Because the OP provided evidence.

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

#38

Post by happyscrappy »

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…

>You are either a serf or a lord. It really is that simple...

No, that is the foolish narrative that keeps this mess going. No amount of money can compensate for parenting.

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

#39

Post by stegosaurus »

happyscrappy wrote: post #38
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…

>You are either a serf or a lord. It really is that simple... No, that is the foolish narrative that keeps this mess going. No amount of money can compensate for parenting.

Parenting without money is disallowed.

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

#40

Post by grossvogel »

sjf wrote: post #3

I think it's great exercise, but why don't they just use an absolute scale for parent's income? "About $2,400 in annual income separates the bottom two dots, while nearly $1 million separates the top two", I would never have guessed this either.

Perhaps the visualization is just better this way, but your question is at least an interesting one to think about. How would the shape of the curve change, and might it suggest slightly different conclusions?

For example, it seems to me the absolute income version would be steeper at low incomes, perhaps amplifying the perceived impact of things like a living wage or basic income on educational outcomes. (I'm talking mainly about the psychological impact of the curve's shape, not raw statistical truths.)

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