Graph of the Day: For High-Scoring Students, Socioeconomic Status Still Matters
My colleague Greg Anrig continues live-blogging his critique of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, with a deconstruction of Murray’s claim that top-tier universities perpetuate a genetically superior elite, whose privilege further isolates them from working-class Americans. As Anrig points out, class privilege in higher education is a problem The Century Foundation takes seriously (our own research shows that 74 percent of the students at highly selective colleges come from the richest socioeconomic quartile, while just 3 percent come from the bottom fourth); but Murray’s obsession with genetic explanations (as in his debunked theories about racial intelligence in The Bell Curve) and his conservative ideology blind him to essential facts about the way that class privilege operates in the real world.
The fact is that among high school students who score in the top 25th percentile on standardized tests, socioeconomic background remains the most significant predictor of whether they will go on to earn a college degree. According to a 2010 Century Foundation report, high-scoring students from a poor socioeconomic background were more than 80% less likely to attend a four-year college than their wealthy peers, and five times more likely to attend no college at all. And with the cost of a four-year college education skyrocketing, is it really any wonder that affordability has become a major obstacle for equally intelligent and deserving students? But Murray takes no time to consider whether income inequality–rather than an inevitable, genetic aristocracy of talent–is to blame for this concentration of class privilege. The data below, from the U.S. Department of Education, tell the true story.
“THE financial crisis and its aftermath have taken a significant toll on American households, but many of the country’s economic problems predate the crisis. New data on income and poverty released by the Census Bureau reveal a picture of sustained stagnation in incomes for most American households. From the richest to the poorest, inflation-adjusted incomes were lower in 2010 than they were a decade ago. Stagnation is a relatively new phenomenon for the rich, but not for the rest. In 2010, the typical American household earned an inflation-adjusted income of $49,445, scarcely different from that in 1989 and a fall of 2.3% since 2009. Current incomes are at roughly the level of the late 1970s for those near the bottom of the income spectrum.
Of course, many of today’s consumer products are of higher quality today than they were in the 1970s, and the typical household has access now to things like iPods and flatscreen televisions that didn’t exist then. On the other hand, the cost of everything from housing to education has risen steadily in recent decades. From a real income perspective, the American economy has already experienced a lost decade, but for the median household the picture is one of a generation of stagnation.”
—The Economist (link)
