
SAT Scores And Family Income - aditya
http://www.businessinsider.com/sat-scores-and-family-income-2009-10
======
bengebre
Looks like a copy of the chart available here:

[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-
and-...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-family-
income/)

That post created a lot of debate a couple of months ago which was summarized
here:

[http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/08...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/08/the-
inheritance-of-education.html)

The chart on that second page appears to show that "higher parental income
predicts higher child income but only for biological children and not for
adoptees."

~~~
tokenadult
The primary source for the self-reported SAT and income band correlations,

[http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/cbs-2009-...](http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/cbs-2009-national-
TOTAL-GROUP.pdf)

the annual College Board report for class of 2009, is linked to from

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=908779>

along with links to other SAT data reports.

------
parse_tree
The only wierd thing to me is that the strength of the relationship appears to
gradually weaken as income gets higher (which would make sense), but then sort
of jumps up at $200,000. That's surprising, I would have thought the highest
would have been around the upper middle class - comfortable enough to be able
to dedicate oneself to school, but poor enough to still be hungry.

I'd like to see the relationship between extremely high SAT scores (e.g., 99th
percentile) and family income. I suspect middle to upper-middle class students
would proportionately outnumber the rich.

~~~
te_platt
Maybe. My guess is there is a correlation between {income and emphasis on
education} and {emphasis on education and SAT scores}. It looks like you are
saying at some score the SAT becomes something of an IQ test and IQs are more
evenly distributed. I'm not sure that is the case.

~~~
parse_tree
No. I think SAT score would be correlated with IQ, but not too strongly on its
own (many not particularly brilliant people get high scores by preparing
excessively). I think measured IQ and family income would, together, be quite
good predictors of SAT performance. But what leads me to believe that also
leads me to believe that predictive strength would tail off as family income
(or IQ) got extremely high. E.g., for very smart people, the SAT is probably
not a challenge, so their score wouldn't benefit much from 10 more IQ points.
Similarly, very rich people can't use their money to do much for their kids
SAT score than those making $150k / year can.

~~~
Retric
I think people that make a lot of money tell their children to focus on the
_important_ aspects of education. And prepping for the SAT has a much better
payoff than most extracurricular activities.

------
kingkilr
It's actually possible to predict someones SAT scores with decent accuracy by
knowing nothing other than their zipcode.

------
aditya
Not saying that correlation == causation, but damn.

~~~
tibbon
There is a fairly logical chain of events here, and I'll agree that while not
perfect causation this is interesting.

Higher SAT scores generally mean better college education (on average) with
more scholarships (enabling less student-loan slavery post-graduation), more
grad school, better jobs, etc.

People that got an 800 on their SAT (out of 1600 in my day) weren't really on
the fast-track anywhere except mowing lawns. The kids pushing closer to
1400-1600 were generally headed to decent schools.

~~~
aditya
Wait what?

I took the chart to mean that if your parents make tons of money, your SAT
score is going to be better, not that if your SAT score was good, you will
make tons of money. Not sure where exactly that chart is coming from so I
dunno what context the axes are in.

~~~
elcron
I interpreted it that way too, x axis is normally the independent variable

------
callmeed
What % of the population takes the SAT at all? Could one argue some sort of
survivor bias since we don't include income for non-SAT takers? (sorry, I'm a
stats noob so I honestly don't know)

~~~
bd
It seems only about a third of the US population takes SAT.

I couldn't get the actual size of the 18-year-old cohort from US Census [1],
but from various age groups it could be estimated to be ~4-5M, while SAT was
taken by ~1.5M people in 2009 [2].

This would also roughly fit with 27% of the population which got bachelor
degree or higher [3].

[1]
[http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/STTable?_bm=y&-qr_n...](http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/STTable?_bm=y&-qr_name=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_S0101&-geo_id=01000US&-ds_name=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_&-_lang=en&-redoLog=false&-state=st)

[2]
[http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/cbs-2009-...](http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/cbs-2009-national-
TOTAL-GROUP.pdf)

[3]
[http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/STTable?_bm=y&-geo_...](http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/STTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-qr_name=ACS_2006_EST_G00_S1501&-ds_name=ACS_2006_EST_G00_&-redoLog=false)

------
tokenadult
The submitted graph only shows mean SAT score (central tendency) for each
test-taker's self-reported income band, and doesn't show the full score
variance in each income band. See also

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Income2.png>

(from a Wikipedia article that reports 1995 score correlations) for another
relationship in the data that doesn't get reported as often by College Board.

------
JoeAltmaier
SAT is full of cultural bias. The classic example from years ago was a vocab
question including yacht; inner-city kids may never have heard of a yacht, so
scored badly. So imagine my amusement when my son saw yacht-racing terms on
the GRE last year.

~~~
jacoblyles
Sure, but that doesn't exactly explain the difference in performance between
adopted and non-adopted children. Whether we like it or not, people are
different, and many of those differences are genetic.

------
tocomment
That chart was totally made in Excel. I'm just saying ...

~~~
parse_tree
I thought the same, which caused me to click on the link they used as
reference, which turned out not to work... <insert eyebrow raised emoticon
here>

