11 ms·

You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances

174 points by dap 11y ago

tedsanders 11y ago
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 does not have a direct or short-term impact on child outcomes. [http://www.ifn.se/eng/publications/wp/2015/1060 http://www.ifn.se/eng/publications/wp/2015/1060]
- mfringel 11y ago
  So... why are you doing something you hate?
  - tedsanders 11y ago
    That's a fair question. When many people make the correlation!=causation argument, they do so to express skepticism, often without any evidence or positive contribution to the discussion. However, in this case, I think the argument is warranted because there is a large body of evidence that suggests wealth does not directly affect whether kids go to college. I linked to one interesting study, but I can link to more if you'd like. In any case, I hoped my comment and link added value to the discussion. If not, I'd be happy to remove them.
- itsybitsycoder 11y ago
  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.
- thoth 11y ago
  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.
- curun1r 11y ago
  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.
stared 11y ago
There 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.
sjf 11y ago
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.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  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.
- grossvogel 11y ago
  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.)
- spranesh 11y ago
  I completely agree. Percentiles are a very unintuitive way of thinking for this sort of data. It's really easy to know how much one made last year, but it takes a while to figure out what percentile one's income was in. Differences in Percentile vs differences in Income is even harder. I felt strongly about this the moment I read the article on NYTimes - I reproduced the data set to the best extent I could and actually went about plotting against absolute income: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jD87QN3pPZjoefrAm4E_OR9UD_rjwae9Gd7MbpjjrNs/pubchart?oid=544948064&format=image https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jD87QN3pPZjoefrAm4E_... That's a far more intuitive chart, that a lot of us will understand better. I also graphed how much these children actually go on to earn against absolute income. I compared these results in a blog post - http://unside.t4you.in/data/intuitive-axes/ http://unside.t4you.in/data/intuitive-axes/ HTH.
maxmcd 11y ago
Would be great to see the results from this without the provided point.
- redthrowaway 11y ago
  Sounds like a great A/B test. Show half the users the 50th %ile and half nothing, then compare the resulting curves.
- Roodgorf 11y ago
  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.
reqres 11y ago
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 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/Free-fees-does-not-help-poor-attend-Scottish-universities.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10354393/Fre... [2] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctppca/credit.pdf http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctppca/credit.pdf
- kolbe 11y ago
  > 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, and there's really no way around it. If Johnny's parents have the will and motivation to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year educating Johnny, they can. I'm sorry, but no country can compete with that. Even increasing per-pupil spending in public schools to that of the Phillip's Academies is arguably impossible in all but a handful of the top GDP/capita nations, let alone all the private tutoring and traveling and internships that Johnny has access to. So, yeah, if you manage to educate poorer children as well as wealthy children, they would achieve similar university performance, but getting their educational background to parity with one-another is so far out of the realm of possibility for most nations that I don't think it should even be mentioned.
gtrubetskoy 11y ago
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 enough. The sad part is that someone who makes $500K a year or has millions in the bank falls in that same category.
- GeneralMayhem 11y ago
  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.
  - danielweber 11y ago
    Living in a high-cost area is a consumption choice, just like me living in a mansion in my town would be.
- tedsanders 11y ago
  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-California.html 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/ http://www.richblockspoorblocks.com/
  - gtrubetskoy 11y ago
    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 to be.
jawns 11y ago
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 used to identify those shapes.
- emaste 11y ago
  I'm very intrigued by this as well. I tried a variety of shapes and the only ones it recognized for me were "S shaped" and "very straight." I did get these too though: "Your guess was extremely accurate. Is that you, Raj Chetty?" "We’re going to be honest here: Your line was pretty odd. Did you even try?"
- astine 11y ago
  I just a took really quick look at the javascript they used and it looks like they matched the lines to a limited set of line shapes based on various heights. So, if the low income part of the line is between these certain values, the medium low income between these, etc, then they show this result. Here's a list of the possible results: [{ key: "kindaSShaped", sentence: "Your line looked a little bit like an S, with a gradual increase for the poorest families and a leveling off for the rich. Thatâ€™s what we guessed the first time, too. But we were wrong. Itâ€™s a straight line." }, { key: "underEstimatePoor", sentence: "You underestimated the chances of college enrollment for the very poorest children. In reality, about one in four children in Americaâ€™s poorest families go to college. (You guessed around " + e.round(t[0]) + " percent.)" }, { key: "overEstimatePoor", sentence: "You overestimated the chances of college enrollment for the very poorest children. In reality, about one in four children in Americaâ€™s poorest families go to college. (You guessed around " + e.round(t[0]) + " percent.)" }, { key: "justRightOnPoor", sentence: "You correctly guessed that children from the very poorest families face tough odds in going to college â€“ only about one in four do." }, { key: "underEstimateRich", sentence: "You underestimated the chances of college enrollment for the very richest children. In reality, about 94 percent of children from Americaâ€™s richest families go to college. (You guessed around " + e.round(t[20]) + " percent.)" }, { key: "overEstimateRich", sentence: "You overestimated the chances of college enrollment for the very richest children. In reality, about 94 percent of children from Americaâ€™s richest families go to college. (You guessed around " + e.round(t[20]) + " percent.)" }, { key: "justRightOnRich", sentence: "You correctly guessed the exceptionally high rates of college enrollment for children from the very richest families â€“ about 94 percent." }, { key: "veryStraight", sentence: "Your line was very straight, which means you correctly guessed one of the more striking findings of this research: The relationship between college enrollment and parental-income rank is linear." }, { key: "kindOfStraight", sentence: "Your line was relatively straight, reflecting one of the more striking findings of this research: The relationship between college enrollment and parental-income rank is linear." }, { key: "lineButNotSteepAddition", sentence: "Your line was not steep enough: Thereâ€™s more inequality than you guessed." }, { key: "lineButTooSteepAddition", sentence: "Your line was too steep: Thereâ€™s more equality than you guessed." }, { key: "perfectAddition", sentence: "Your guess was extremely accurate. Is that you, <a target='_blank' href = 'http://www.rajchetty.com/'>Raj Chetty</a>?" }, { key: "youAreWeird", sentence: "Weâ€™re going to be honest here: Your line was pretty odd. Did you even try?" }, { key: "youAreCanada", sentence: "Your line, which was relatively horizontal, was admirable: It suggests that everyone has the same chance of going to college regardless of parental income. <a target = '_blank' href = 'http://www.nber.org/papers/w17218'>But not even Canada</a> is that egalitarian." }, { key: "trustFundDip", sentence: "You guessed that there would be a small decrease in college attendance for the richest families â€“ something weâ€™ve called the trust-fund dip. It makes some intuitive sense â€“ if youâ€™re born into an extremely wealthy family, itâ€™s reasonable to think that thereâ€™s less incentive to attend college. But the trust-fund dip does not exist." }, { key: "youIgnoredOurNote", sentence: "It looks as if you didnâ€™t use the free point we gave you, which may be one of the reasons you performed worse than other people." }, { key: "downwardSlope", sentence: "Your line sloped downward. Did you believe that rich children were less likely to go to college than poor children? Or did you misunderstand the axis?"
noobie 11y ago
Tangentially, how is that "applet" created?
- danielvinson 11y ago
  Its mostly d3.js
sendos 11y ago
Results are interesting, though unfortunately not too surprising. As an aside, I did really well in drawing the curve. The website asked me "Is that you, Raj Chetty?" [http://imgur.com/XU4UNya http://imgur.com/XU4UNya]
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malchow 11y ago
How would the curve change if the sample were cut to reflect only those students who scored in the top 1/3 on the SAT?
- Nicholas_C 11y ago
  That would be very interesting. I would expect the higher income side to remain practically unchanged while the lower income side would move up to 50% or so, but still be far below the higher income side.
stegosaurus 11y ago
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, revenue. A western person stashes away 10e0 - 10e7 over a lifetime, balance sheet. Why? It is predominantly not about decision making and choices to save. Yes, people do make suboptimal decisions. But mostly, people are simply unable to save because the baseline of living sucks up all of their work. In the UK a poor person rents instead of owning because we allow the group of capitalists to own all housing and restrict new building. Until we deal with that we are just pissing around.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  >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.
  - stegosaurus 11y ago
    Parenting without money is disallowed.
- Yakimoto 11y ago
  >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.
  - stegosaurus 11y ago
    Reading my post again I can see why you would think that. I just feel frustrated, that's all. It feels like the premise is just so obviously silly.... like these articles are just fluff. Am I insane? Of course people with wealth do better at everything. It's definitional. That is what wealth is... better schools, better food, better holidays... bigger better more. I don't see the value in continually studying how bad the poor have it and how well the rich have it. It feels to me like a textbook example of a fruitless endeavour. Like trying to make a human powered bicycle that's faster than a fighter jet, or something. It's just... daft! Even if you think of a way to do it it's bloody silly. Stick both people in the same vehicle.
ninv 11y ago
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.
- massysett 11y ago
  If that's what you think, having kids is certainly not for you, regardless of what any "guideline" would say.
  - ninv 11y ago
    Yeah, like having a vacation home in Florida is not for me. If I want i can have it, i can apply for mortgage and buy one tomorrow, but i can not afford it. I should not do it.
ylem 11y ago
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%.
smrtinsert 11y ago
Dragged 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.
reamworks 11y ago
This is nonsense. If you correct for Socio-economic status, you'll find the best predictor is IQ. You can give a kid an IQ test at age 10 and know whether or not he'll graduate college. Since IQ is heritable, kids from more successful homes will be more successful.
- untog 11y ago
  If you correct for Socio-economic status ...which is the entire point
  - reamworks 11y ago
    You'll find SES isn't what this is showing--it's IQ differences.
    - untog 11y ago
      It isn't, though.
balls187 11y ago
Drew a oscillating curve. Definite lulz in the outcome.
peachysanchez 11y ago
To some extent, it is true that finances (or the lack of) play a big part in whether or not a student goes to university. However, if you were born under those circumstances, like I was, the best thing to do is to work hard to make sure you reach that goal. I was born in an environment where attending university is not a necessity but a privilege. People from our neighborhood would rather have their children working after high school. Why? Because working rakes in money for the household, while attending school means having to spend out of what is left of your household's allocated budget. I thought differently. I knew that if I thought the way my parents did, it will be a never-ending story. My son and his sons will suffer the same fate. I didn't want that. While I was still in high school, I knew I wouldn't be able to attend further schooling so I started to save. After graduating, I tried hard to look for scholarships. While waiting, I enrolled myself in http://preply.com/en http://preply.com/en for some private tuturing because it was more affordable. I didn't want to get left behind. As of the moment, I am still waiting, I am behind by 1 year but I believe that I will get there. If I ever get into university, I will have proof that sometimes, it's only just a matter of working hard for your dreams. If not, I will make sure that my son does.
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rgbrenner 11y ago
link is 404... http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/28/upshot/you-draw-it-how-family-income-affects-childrens-college-chances.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/28/upshot/you-dra...
stegosaurus 11y ago
Why does it matter? (for reference I went to a decent university having had a poor upbringing). Are we substantially better off in a world with 1000 arbitrary people going to e.g. Cambridge vs one in which 1000 upper class children go? (expand the concept to university in general if you wish). You still have unbalanced outcomes based on what eventually comes down to a lottery of some sort. Even if you choose the absolute best 1000, are the next 10000, 20000, 30000 actually materially worse? Going beyond that, surely the concept of prestige in and of itself is problematic? Should you get a better life because you have a higher IQ? Why? Do we actually want that? Would we design the world that way if we actively chose? I certainly wouldn't... why should my friend have a shit life due to quirk of birth? Why should my other friend have a dramatically better life due to the same? We seem to strive to normalise things that are/were seen as handicaps, like race, disability, sex, etc. etc. But we are seemingly unwilling to accept that the idea of ranking humans is broken. It only makes sense as a hack to encourage productive behaviours - it might not even be needed any more soon.
- neuro_imager 11y ago
  Great line of enquiry. I suspect it matters because we assume those with attributes such as greater IQ would utilise the education better then a random group of lottery winners. We then assume that that would result in greater communal good. We also live under the illusion of attempts at fairness rather than perpetuating privilege.

174 points by dap 11y ago

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 does not have a direct or short-term impact on child outcomes. [http://www.ifn.se/eng/publications/wp/2015/1060 http://www.ifn.se/eng/publications/wp/2015/1060]

mfringel 11y ago
So... why are you doing something you hate?
- tedsanders 11y ago
  That's a fair question. When many people make the correlation!=causation argument, they do so to express skepticism, often without any evidence or positive contribution to the discussion. However, in this case, I think the argument is warranted because there is a large body of evidence that suggests wealth does not directly affect whether kids go to college. I linked to one interesting study, but I can link to more if you'd like. In any case, I hoped my comment and link added value to the discussion. If not, I'd be happy to remove them.
itsybitsycoder 11y ago
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.
thoth 11y ago
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.
curun1r 11y ago
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.

stared 11y ago

There 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.

sjf 11y ago

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.

stephengillie 11y ago
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.
grossvogel 11y ago
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.)
spranesh 11y ago
I completely agree. Percentiles are a very unintuitive way of thinking for this sort of data. It's really easy to know how much one made last year, but it takes a while to figure out what percentile one's income was in. Differences in Percentile vs differences in Income is even harder. I felt strongly about this the moment I read the article on NYTimes - I reproduced the data set to the best extent I could and actually went about plotting against absolute income: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jD87QN3pPZjoefrAm4E_OR9UD_rjwae9Gd7MbpjjrNs/pubchart?oid=544948064&format=image https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jD87QN3pPZjoefrAm4E_... That's a far more intuitive chart, that a lot of us will understand better. I also graphed how much these children actually go on to earn against absolute income. I compared these results in a blog post - http://unside.t4you.in/data/intuitive-axes/ http://unside.t4you.in/data/intuitive-axes/ HTH.

maxmcd 11y ago

Would be great to see the results from this without the provided point.

redthrowaway 11y ago
Sounds like a great A/B test. Show half the users the 50th %ile and half nothing, then compare the resulting curves.
Roodgorf 11y ago
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.

reqres 11y ago

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 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/Free-fees-does-not-help-poor-attend-Scottish-universities.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10354393/Fre... [2] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctppca/credit.pdf http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctppca/credit.pdf

kolbe 11y ago
> 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, and there's really no way around it. If Johnny's parents have the will and motivation to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year educating Johnny, they can. I'm sorry, but no country can compete with that. Even increasing per-pupil spending in public schools to that of the Phillip's Academies is arguably impossible in all but a handful of the top GDP/capita nations, let alone all the private tutoring and traveling and internships that Johnny has access to. So, yeah, if you manage to educate poorer children as well as wealthy children, they would achieve similar university performance, but getting their educational background to parity with one-another is so far out of the realm of possibility for most nations that I don't think it should even be mentioned.

gtrubetskoy 11y ago

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 enough. The sad part is that someone who makes $500K a year or has millions in the bank falls in that same category.

GeneralMayhem 11y ago
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.
- danielweber 11y ago
  Living in a high-cost area is a consumption choice, just like me living in a mansion in my town would be.
tedsanders 11y ago
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-California.html 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/ http://www.richblockspoorblocks.com/
- gtrubetskoy 11y ago
  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 to be.

jawns 11y ago

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 used to identify those shapes.

emaste 11y ago
I'm very intrigued by this as well. I tried a variety of shapes and the only ones it recognized for me were "S shaped" and "very straight." I did get these too though: "Your guess was extremely accurate. Is that you, Raj Chetty?" "We’re going to be honest here: Your line was pretty odd. Did you even try?"
astine 11y ago
I just a took really quick look at the javascript they used and it looks like they matched the lines to a limited set of line shapes based on various heights. So, if the low income part of the line is between these certain values, the medium low income between these, etc, then they show this result. Here's a list of the possible results: [{ key: "kindaSShaped", sentence: "Your line looked a little bit like an S, with a gradual increase for the poorest families and a leveling off for the rich. Thatâ€™s what we guessed the first time, too. But we were wrong. Itâ€™s a straight line." }, { key: "underEstimatePoor", sentence: "You underestimated the chances of college enrollment for the very poorest children. In reality, about one in four children in Americaâ€™s poorest families go to college. (You guessed around " + e.round(t[0]) + " percent.)" }, { key: "overEstimatePoor", sentence: "You overestimated the chances of college enrollment for the very poorest children. In reality, about one in four children in Americaâ€™s poorest families go to college. (You guessed around " + e.round(t[0]) + " percent.)" }, { key: "justRightOnPoor", sentence: "You correctly guessed that children from the very poorest families face tough odds in going to college â€“ only about one in four do." }, { key: "underEstimateRich", sentence: "You underestimated the chances of college enrollment for the very richest children. In reality, about 94 percent of children from Americaâ€™s richest families go to college. (You guessed around " + e.round(t[20]) + " percent.)" }, { key: "overEstimateRich", sentence: "You overestimated the chances of college enrollment for the very richest children. In reality, about 94 percent of children from Americaâ€™s richest families go to college. (You guessed around " + e.round(t[20]) + " percent.)" }, { key: "justRightOnRich", sentence: "You correctly guessed the exceptionally high rates of college enrollment for children from the very richest families â€“ about 94 percent." }, { key: "veryStraight", sentence: "Your line was very straight, which means you correctly guessed one of the more striking findings of this research: The relationship between college enrollment and parental-income rank is linear." }, { key: "kindOfStraight", sentence: "Your line was relatively straight, reflecting one of the more striking findings of this research: The relationship between college enrollment and parental-income rank is linear." }, { key: "lineButNotSteepAddition", sentence: "Your line was not steep enough: Thereâ€™s more inequality than you guessed." }, { key: "lineButTooSteepAddition", sentence: "Your line was too steep: Thereâ€™s more equality than you guessed." }, { key: "perfectAddition", sentence: "Your guess was extremely accurate. Is that you, <a target='_blank' href = 'http://www.rajchetty.com/'>Raj Chetty</a>?" }, { key: "youAreWeird", sentence: "Weâ€™re going to be honest here: Your line was pretty odd. Did you even try?" }, { key: "youAreCanada", sentence: "Your line, which was relatively horizontal, was admirable: It suggests that everyone has the same chance of going to college regardless of parental income. <a target = '_blank' href = 'http://www.nber.org/papers/w17218'>But not even Canada</a> is that egalitarian." }, { key: "trustFundDip", sentence: "You guessed that there would be a small decrease in college attendance for the richest families â€“ something weâ€™ve called the trust-fund dip. It makes some intuitive sense â€“ if youâ€™re born into an extremely wealthy family, itâ€™s reasonable to think that thereâ€™s less incentive to attend college. But the trust-fund dip does not exist." }, { key: "youIgnoredOurNote", sentence: "It looks as if you didnâ€™t use the free point we gave you, which may be one of the reasons you performed worse than other people." }, { key: "downwardSlope", sentence: "Your line sloped downward. Did you believe that rich children were less likely to go to college than poor children? Or did you misunderstand the axis?"

noobie 11y ago

Tangentially, how is that "applet" created?

danielvinson 11y ago
Its mostly d3.js

sendos 11y ago

Results are interesting, though unfortunately not too surprising. As an aside, I did really well in drawing the curve. The website asked me "Is that you, Raj Chetty?" [http://imgur.com/XU4UNya http://imgur.com/XU4UNya]

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malchow 11y ago

How would the curve change if the sample were cut to reflect only those students who scored in the top 1/3 on the SAT?

Nicholas_C 11y ago
That would be very interesting. I would expect the higher income side to remain practically unchanged while the lower income side would move up to 50% or so, but still be far below the higher income side.

stegosaurus 11y ago

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, revenue. A western person stashes away 10e0 - 10e7 over a lifetime, balance sheet. Why? It is predominantly not about decision making and choices to save. Yes, people do make suboptimal decisions. But mostly, people are simply unable to save because the baseline of living sucks up all of their work. In the UK a poor person rents instead of owning because we allow the group of capitalists to own all housing and restrict new building. Until we deal with that we are just pissing around.

happyscrappy 11y ago
>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.
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  Parenting without money is disallowed.
Yakimoto 11y ago
>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.
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  Reading my post again I can see why you would think that. I just feel frustrated, that's all. It feels like the premise is just so obviously silly.... like these articles are just fluff. Am I insane? Of course people with wealth do better at everything. It's definitional. That is what wealth is... better schools, better food, better holidays... bigger better more. I don't see the value in continually studying how bad the poor have it and how well the rich have it. It feels to me like a textbook example of a fruitless endeavour. Like trying to make a human powered bicycle that's faster than a fighter jet, or something. It's just... daft! Even if you think of a way to do it it's bloody silly. Stick both people in the same vehicle.

ninv 11y ago

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.

massysett 11y ago
If that's what you think, having kids is certainly not for you, regardless of what any "guideline" would say.
- ninv 11y ago
  Yeah, like having a vacation home in Florida is not for me. If I want i can have it, i can apply for mortgage and buy one tomorrow, but i can not afford it. I should not do it.

ylem 11y ago

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%.

smrtinsert 11y ago

Dragged 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.

reamworks 11y ago

This is nonsense. If you correct for Socio-economic status, you'll find the best predictor is IQ. You can give a kid an IQ test at age 10 and know whether or not he'll graduate college. Since IQ is heritable, kids from more successful homes will be more successful.

untog 11y ago
If you correct for Socio-economic status ...which is the entire point
- reamworks 11y ago
  You'll find SES isn't what this is showing--it's IQ differences.
  - untog 11y ago
    It isn't, though.

balls187 11y ago

Drew a oscillating curve. Definite lulz in the outcome.

peachysanchez 11y ago

To some extent, it is true that finances (or the lack of) play a big part in whether or not a student goes to university. However, if you were born under those circumstances, like I was, the best thing to do is to work hard to make sure you reach that goal. I was born in an environment where attending university is not a necessity but a privilege. People from our neighborhood would rather have their children working after high school. Why? Because working rakes in money for the household, while attending school means having to spend out of what is left of your household's allocated budget. I thought differently. I knew that if I thought the way my parents did, it will be a never-ending story. My son and his sons will suffer the same fate. I didn't want that. While I was still in high school, I knew I wouldn't be able to attend further schooling so I started to save. After graduating, I tried hard to look for scholarships. While waiting, I enrolled myself in http://preply.com/en http://preply.com/en for some private tuturing because it was more affordable. I didn't want to get left behind. As of the moment, I am still waiting, I am behind by 1 year but I believe that I will get there. If I ever get into university, I will have proof that sometimes, it's only just a matter of working hard for your dreams. If not, I will make sure that my son does.

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rgbrenner 11y ago

link is 404... http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/28/upshot/you-draw-it-how-family-income-affects-childrens-college-chances.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/28/upshot/you-dra...

stegosaurus 11y ago

Why does it matter? (for reference I went to a decent university having had a poor upbringing). Are we substantially better off in a world with 1000 arbitrary people going to e.g. Cambridge vs one in which 1000 upper class children go? (expand the concept to university in general if you wish). You still have unbalanced outcomes based on what eventually comes down to a lottery of some sort. Even if you choose the absolute best 1000, are the next 10000, 20000, 30000 actually materially worse? Going beyond that, surely the concept of prestige in and of itself is problematic? Should you get a better life because you have a higher IQ? Why? Do we actually want that? Would we design the world that way if we actively chose? I certainly wouldn't... why should my friend have a shit life due to quirk of birth? Why should my other friend have a dramatically better life due to the same? We seem to strive to normalise things that are/were seen as handicaps, like race, disability, sex, etc. etc. But we are seemingly unwilling to accept that the idea of ranking humans is broken. It only makes sense as a hack to encourage productive behaviours - it might not even be needed any more soon.

neuro_imager 11y ago
Great line of enquiry. I suspect it matters because we assume those with attributes such as greater IQ would utilise the education better then a random group of lottery winners. We then assume that that would result in greater communal good. We also live under the illusion of attempts at fairness rather than perpetuating privilege.