I think a more interesting line to see would be graduation rates...At least in the US, the average graduation rates from college are surprisingly (at least to me!) low at around 55%.
You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
51–60 of 98 posts
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Total yearly cost of attendance is $32,944 ($62K out of state) for School of Engineering to be precise: http://sfs.virginia.edu/cost/15-16
And thank you!
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#53Earlier 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…
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 worryin…
I don't think I claim that's the only metric that matters. If I did, that was a mistake. Money is a big influencing factor in-terms of saying what kinds of resources a child has access to for their education, because it's simple to turn money into tutoring or other life experiences. But obviously, for example, having parents who themselves are well-educated and understand how to educate children is a resource that can be more valuable than just having parents with money. There are, of course, many many other examples of non-monetary resources that are accessible by some children and not other, though.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#54As 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…
Your Telegraph article makes the argument that the fees paid by all students allow the universities in England to offer more money in bursaries to the truly disadvantaged. Which contradicts your argument that money isn't important.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#55Tangentially, how is that "applet" created?
Its mostly d3.js
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#56As 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…
> when you control for educational achievement (i.e. how well students achieve in pre-uni schooling), income level is a much weaker predictor of whether someone attends university. The primary driver of low university enrolment is educational achievement.
The Times reported the exact opposite finding a year ago:
> whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. ... About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.
> ... ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-gradu...
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#57I 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…
The causation is probably the reverse. Parents who send their kids to college make more money. And that's possibly indirect through the fact that people who go to college earn more money, so we're probably seeing the effect of having well-educated parents.
It would be really interesting to see if income plays a part once you control for parental education levels. Segment by both parents have college degrees, one parent has a degree and neither parent has a degree. We'd probably see a much weaker correlation with income at that point.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 among…
Vouchers don't work as well as you'd expect. The reason is that parents are not rational agents on behalf of their children. Especially parents of lower socioeconomic status tend to value convenience (how close the school is) to the quality of the school.
The effect of vouchers in the real world is that the best schools get a little bit better while the worst ones get a lot worse.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#59If 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…
This is the case for a lot of things. Pretty much all "middle-class" tax credits phase out by the time you hit $80k, regardless of cost of living, because the IRS doesn't scale anything by zip code and so assumes that a household making 6 figures must be loaded.
Living in a high-cost area is a consumption choice, just like me living in a mansion in my town would be.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#60Dragged a line, it locked my windows 7 office box and forced windows explorer to restart after about two minutes of waiting. I expect more from them.