
You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances - dap
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/28/upshot/you-draw-it-how-family-income-affects-childrens-college-chances.html
======
reqres
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/Fre...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10354393/Free-
fees-does-not-help-poor-attend-Scottish-universities.html)

[2]
[http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctppca/credit.pdf](http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctppca/credit.pdf)

~~~
kolbe
> 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.

~~~
tikhonj
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...](http://www.cep-
dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=405#sthash.ABEwXRV0.dpuf)

~~~
kolbe
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.

------
stared
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.

------
jawns
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.

~~~
ffn
Yeah, I was really interested too. From what I can get from playing around in
the console, they (probably jashkenas and his cronies) they're using d3 to do
the rendering. Since d3 has convenient map / filter / reduce chains, I assume
(though have no proof), they can figure out the shape of your line by doing ye
olde' rise / run calculation for each point. If your slopes gets significantly
bigger at some point, you must have a S shape. They also force you draw only 1
point per x-increment, so they don't have to handle bad users drawing vertical
lines.

~~~
kquealy
Glad to see so much discussion of this here! Always cool to see our work on
HN.

To answer this question, yes, we (Jeremy's cronies) are indeed using D3 to do
most of the drawing and interactions. He also forced us to use Underscore.

The heat map showing everyone's responses is done in Canvas.

Hope that helps.

-KQ

------
stegosaurus
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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Savings rates: US 17% India 32% China 51%. Apparently the Chinese manage to
save without having that "baseline of living" sucking up all their work. Yet
Chinese people earn far less than Americans .

How is that possible? It's almost as if your "baseline of living" is actually
"living high on the hog as if tomorrow doesn't exist".

[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNS.ICTR.ZS](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNS.ICTR.ZS)

~~~
stegosaurus
The average person in the UK cannot save 51% of net income. It is totally
impossible. Difficult even for someone earning above the median wage.

Is paying the rent 'living high on the hog'? I don't get it. Rent alone on a
studio flat in loads of places is 10K. If you move away you earn less than you
save on the rent.

What's the suggestion? Live 2 to a room? Live in a car?

Theoretically possible if you're determined I suppose.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The 5'th decile in the UK earns a little under double what the 1st decile
does. Since the people in the 1st decile aren't dying, that suggests that yes
- someone in the 5'th decile could live like a person in the 1'st decile and
save 50%.

[http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes-
how-...](http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes-how-salary-
compare)

Pretty much every story you could tell to explain this away (e.g., folks in
the City earn 2x as much but cost of living is 2x higher) kind of undermine
any real inequality story.

~~~
stegosaurus
How does that follow?

A person working in London cannot live like a person working in Preston (for
the same amount). The same quality of life costs more.

Surely you understand this? Do you work FT? I don't really know how to go
further with this, it feels a bit like trying to prove that the sky is blue.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If that's the case, then you need to adjust your income/wealth/etc inequality
numbers by that same factor. I.e., the inequality for a person living in
London and earning 2x as much as someone in Preston might need to be adjusted
down to perfect equality (assuming the cost of living in London is also 2x
Preston). So why didn't you adjust your numbers in this way?

Also, if inequality is merely a matter of where one lives, why do you care?

As I said, this sort of observation seriously undermines basically every
complaint about inequality.

~~~
stegosaurus
Well, my argument is that most cannot save. Relevant amounts, anyway (a grand
a year isn't going to really get you anywhere).

Your rebuttal was that the 5th decile earning twice as much surely can,
because the 1st decile survive by spending less.

My argument is that the 5th decile are predominantly in higher cost of living
areas and end up in roughly the same situation.

But let's just concede and say that they can. No doubt some can - there are
people earning median UK wage in the north.

The bottom guys still can't save at all. Do they just not matter? Should
10/20/30/40% of the population be stuck renting for their entire lives? Is
that reasonable?

I am not making the claim that a London worker earning double a Preston worker
is a problem.

My claim is that people earning far more than that being able to build masses
of capital whilst others cannot build capital at all is a problem.

It's not really about the numbers at all; it's more the idea that me "owning"
20 homes and forcing others to labour if they want to live in them is OK.

I dunno. I kind of don't have enough interest in continuing this, I gain
nothing from convincing you. I know people who cannot save, many of them, they
exist. They aren't intelligent enough to get out of that hole unless they won
a lottery or similar. I don't need to convince you that they exist, because I
can like, go and visit them. I want to fix that, you seemingly don't, best of
luck.

------
tedsanders
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
So... why are you doing something you hate?

~~~
tedsanders
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.

------
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.

~~~
massysett
If that's what you think, having kids is certainly not for you, regardless of
what any "guideline" would say.

~~~
ninv
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.

------
stegosaurus
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
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.

------
sjf
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
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.

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

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

------
sendos
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)]

------
malchow
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
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.

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

------
ylem
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
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.

------
gtrubetskoy
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.

~~~
tedsanders
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-Califor...](http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco-
California.html)

And here's a better map, though it doesn't seem to have household/family
incomes:
[http://www.richblockspoorblocks.com/](http://www.richblockspoorblocks.com/)

~~~
curun1r
Living wage is different than the poverty line. I wouldn't be surprised if
$150k was really tight for a family of 4 in SF proper.

Running the calculations, a payroll calculator indicates that $150k/yr turns
into $3925 take home every 2 weeks or just over $100k/yr. The housing alone
for a three bedroom (assuming everyone shares a room) would run at least
$60k/yr. That leaves $40k/yr to support 6 people. That may be possible, but
it's not easy and it's damn near impossible to be saving for college on that
amount of money.

~~~
tedsanders
(1) A family of four means four people

(2) $40k/year is enough money to support four people (or even six), if you've
already paid taxes and rent. That's more than $500-800 per month for
food/clothes/transportation/entertainment, etc.

(3) Middle-income parents spend about $7,000 a year per child (or $600/mo),
not counting housing.
[[http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2014/...](http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2014/08/0179.xml&contentidonly=true)]

Of course, many people would like families to get more than $150,000 of
income, but I hope we all agree that it's common to get by on less than
$150,000 of family income, as most families do.

------
balls187
Drew a oscillating curve. Definite lulz in the outcome.

------
noobie
Tangentially, how is that "applet" created?

~~~
danielvinson
Its mostly d3.js

------
reamworks
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
_If you correct for Socio-economic status_

...which is the entire point

~~~
reamworks
You'll find SES isn't what this is showing--it's IQ differences.

~~~
untog
It isn't, though.

