You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
1–10 of 98 posts
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#2There are so many things I like about this data presentation:
- it uses percentiles rather than absolute numbers (though, some scaling would be great, e.g. on the top axis),
- it presents a full dependency rather than squeezes it to a number or two,
- it makes you engaged by prompting to take a guess,
- it shows other guesses.
I added it to my list of good examples of data vis/presentation.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#3I 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.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#4Would be great to see the results from this without the provided point.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#5I 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.
I think this way scales better - it's easier to visualize than the massive gap would be. And where we are in the news cycle is to focus on problems common to all classes, not the problems that divide classes.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#6Would be great to see the results from this without the provided point.
Sounds like a great A/B test. Show half the users the 50th %ile and half nothing, then compare the resulting curves.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#7Would be great to see the results from this without the provided point.
Agreed. I suppose it makes the aggregate result a bit more tidy, which makes it easier to show that most people had relatively the same idea about the relationship, but for me at least having that dot to strive for in the middle skewed my projection from my initial imagining.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#8As 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 misleading. There's substantial evidence [at least in rich countries, see US example below] that 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. i.e. the main chain of causation is this: low income -> low education achievement -> low college attendance. The key to raising university enrolment among poor students is to provide better education/development opportunities and aspiration.
This is important because the policy implications are vastly different according to how well you understand the data. The UK is an interesting case in point where tuition fees (£9k per year) have been levied in England for almost a decade; whereas this has been abolished in Scotland. Despite this, Scotland has the worst university enrolment among its poorer students within the union. [1]
Edit: Ok I found the paper with US data [2]. The Evidence on Credit Constraints in Post Secondary Education by Pedro Carneiro and James Heckman (FYI, a nobel laureate).
Note the graphs on pages 17 and 20 which illustrate the point most clearly. When you compare them, you can see that once you control for a range of important variables - peers within the same AFQT test scores have very similar enrolment rates across all income quartiles.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10354393/Fre...
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#9If 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 enough.
The sad part is that someone who makes $500K a year or has millions in the bank falls in that same category.
Re: You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
#10A 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 used to identify those shapes.