You Draw It: How Family Income Affects College Chances
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.<p>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.<p>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]<p>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).<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10354393/Free-fees-does-not-help-poor-attend-Scottish-universities.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10354393/Fre...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctppca/credit.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctppca/credit.pdf</a>