Thursday, May 28, 2015

Family Income and College Chances

In the next section we are going to discuss labor market concerns including the growing levels of income inequality. Here is a fun, interesting interactive graph from the NY Times. How well did you do? Why do you think you were off?


5 comments:

  1. I found this activity to be very cool and insightful. Overall I did a fairly okay job at drawing my prediction of what the curve on the graph was to look like for the relationship between family income and the children who attend college. The part of the graph that I predicted the poorest was the part that was below the 50th percentile for family income. My curve was lower than reality, which shows that I believe it is more challenging for people with a lower income to attend college. I think the reason that I was off at this point is that I have had experience with people in this particular demographic, and I see the struggle to go to college. A lot of what I see is that there is a lack of motivation to go to college to receive an education because the parents usually aren't very highly educated; therefore they make it apparent to their kids that education is something expensive that won't get you very far.

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  2. I think I did pretty well as I drew a more accurate picture that about 89% of people who have tried so far. The line I drew was too steep, and I was off for the reason that I thought there was a bit more inequality in reality. I found it interesting that reality forms a remarkably straight line. This is because the relationship between college enrollment and parental-income rank is linear

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  3. According to the site, I did better than about 61% of people who tried as of 6/8/2015. I think I over-thought the exercise. I was taking into account recent declines in government funding of financial aid for college as well as college completion rates for the lower-income families. I was also trying to compensate for the likelihood of these children being first-generation entrants into the post-secondary education arena and the impact it might have on the families' ability to lend support (help with homework to financial help with books & fees). Near the end of the article, it did discuss these factors I tried to include in my guesstimate, so it's good to know I wasn't completely off base when thinking of those things.

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  4. I was fascinated by this activity. I was in in the top 85% of people for accuracy. I think I was more fascinated by the accuracy numbers than I was the college attendance numbers. The idea that that large a number of people, who either read the Times or simply participate in these types of things, were that off. The area I was most incorrect in was the above 60th percentile area. I had no idea (especially in the 80+ percentile) that THAT many of their children went to college. I knew that it has practically become a socially accepted norm, unfortunately, that everyone needs to go to college, but I didn't think the numbers would reflect that quite as much.

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  5. Perhaps I'm a pessimist due to my lack of accuracy. I made the assumption that the rates of college enrollment in the lower socio-economic classes were far lower than reality due to financial barriers to entry. I didn't account for the widespread use of student loans and that threw me off from reality. However, I was spot-on after the 55 percentile mark.

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