It turns out that if are someone from a family in the top-quarter of the income distribution who enters college, you are extremely likely to complete a bachelor’s degree by age 24; if you are in the bottom of the income distribution, you only have about a 22% chance of having a bachelor’s degree by age 24.
Read the whole thing. As he does so well, Taylor manages to locate an interesting report and extract fascinating material from it.
In terms of the Demographic Divide (one of the Four Forces), I think that the high-income college entrants are likely to have several advantages. First, they are more likely to have inherited high IQ and high conscientiousness. Second, their parents are more likely to have had their children after they were married and to have remained married after they had children. Third, the parents are likely to have better skills for identifying and dealing with their children’s needs. Finally, the parents have more financial resources to support the child. The report seems to emphasize only the last of these.
And I will finish the thought- the report emphasizes only the last factor because it is the only one the authors can imagine is open to government intervention. However, I am just about 100% certain that the last factor is by far the least important of the ones Kling listed.
I can’t speak to magnitudes without reading the study, but the comment is made: “Of course, if one took into account the fact that students whose families are in the bottom quarter of the income distribution are less likely to become high school graduates, the gap would be wider still.”
It is funny how these comments are all made in a vacuum as if they don’t undermine the narrative. You can’t blame high school incompletion on sticker prices. You would have to fall back on basic financial hardship. I would like to see the controlled study where you give marginal students or their families straight up cash. We could presume they would spend it on their highest need. Does this increase completion rates? At what cost?
Then there are the things that even libertarians might not imagine. Maybe we should move to a semesters completed and precise skills learned instead of 4+ years completed model. It is a shame that people perhaps destined not to complete a degree essentially waste the time and money involved getting partly through without finishing. Reducing government subsidy to low completion rate programs is an intervention they could do at low cost and it might accelerate creative destruction in education.
I can think of one way that top-quarter income distribution definitely benefits children. If an upper income family wants the status of children having degrees they will pay (and overpay) for it. I don’t know what fraction that would account for, but is it a bad thing from the perspective of the narrative? Do we think of education as a scarce resource in the sense that top income students would be crowding out lower income students? Or are they subsidizing them?
IIRC, there was a study? experiment? charity? that essentially bribed kids to graduate. While looking for that online, I came across this:
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/freakonomics-radio/bribing-kids-do-well-school
If I find the one I’m looking for, I’ll be back with a link.
There’s another elephant lurking.
The children of parents in the upper 25% will have had family friends, peer groups, sports groups, and so on, of good social, economic, and intellectual quality. The vendors hiered to maintain theri dwellings and vehicles will have been of professional demeanor. They won’t be subjected to the corrosive effects of gangs, petty crime, various disorderly street behavoirs, etc. Their lives will be filled with sound examples of successful life behavoirs.
The children of parents in the lower 25% will not always, but very often, be exposed to all manner of corrosive peers, corrosive family conditions, gangs, drug dealers, random pointless violence, and so on.
Their lives will be filled with many bad examples of general failure.
I futher conjecture, and invite testing, that children from the lower 25% who grow up in 50th percentile and above neighborhoods, do better than other lower 25% children. And further, than children of very well off households exposed to bad peer groups and bad social environments do poorly. (Children of rock stars with heavy drug habits, say.)
I do not know that adoption studies refute your conjecture, but I think they undermine it.
What about by age 26 or 30?
Another possible factor, entrants from the bottom 20% just don’t value a bachelors degree as much.
Are there any economic models for meritocracy? Because it seems to me that the outcome bemoaned here is exactly the one you would expect 3 generations after meritocracy took hold, which is about where we are at.
There was an article in the WSJ this week regarding poor Chinese immigrants in NYC and their love of test prep for their kids. So it isn’t like the poor have no access to higher levels in the meritocracy for their kids. They just generally make bad choices.