Go to page 25 and look at figure 18 of this Pew report. I heard about this from a source that was focusing on the (IMO less surprising) fact that while only ten percent of college graduates who came from families in the bottom quintile end up in the top quintile as adults, 25 percent of non-college graduates from the top quintile nevertheless stay there as adults.
But in gazing at this kind of complicated chart for a while, what really struck me is that blue section of the second quintile. They are more likely to eventually move up to the top quintile than college grads from the middle or fourth quintiles, and nearly four times as likely as college grads from the lowest quintile. What’s up with that? Pew has a great reputation, and their sample sizes are normally too large to produce outliers. But is there any economic or sociological principle that would explain a result like this?
Well, their definition of income includes interest and dividends. I bet you Mitt Romney’s kids will be top quintile even if they have the collective IQ of soup (I have no idea how smart his kids are, for the record, it’s just a rhetorical device.) All they have to do to stay there is not invest all their inheritances in something foolish.
If I’m looking at the same chart you are, the differences really aren’t that dramatic. 37% vs 31% and 35%. It doesn’t seem to be an effect that couldn’t be explained by a somewhat more prestigious set of colleges, higher family expectations (and maybe better family connections) and maybe the financial wherewithal to allow the acquisition of advanced degrees such as MBAs or MDs.
A somewhat more interesting question (to me) is, why is the middle quintile composed of such slackers?
The first thing that strikes me from that chart is that college makes more of a difference to kids from the lower quintiles than the higher ones. Your chances of getting to the top are (roughly)
Top/fourth quintile: twice as good if you went to college
Middle quintile: between two and three times as good if you went to college
Bottom/second quintiles: three to four times as good if you went to college.
As far as the absolute sizes of the segments go, I think what you may be seeing is an artefact of the fact that the blue and red bars have been scaled to the same size. I would imagine that, for the bottom two quintiles, you don’t have as many kids going to college as not. That 37% of 2nd quintile kids who “make it” may actually represent a smaller proportion of all 2nd quintile kids born, than the 31% of 3rd quintile kids is a proportion of all 3rd quintile kids born. If you see what I mean.
ETA: So basically, I don’t think you can interpret it to say that 2nd quintile kids have better economic mobility than 3rd, if that’s the way you were heading. More likely that more of them get cut off from the race before they reach the college stage.
I think both of you may be reading the chart wrong. The second quintile is working poor and lower middle-class. They are the ones who are shockingly rising to the top at a better clip than the two quintiles above them.
Their COLLEGE GRADUATES are shockingly rising to the top at a better clip.
I’m guessing fewer working poor kids go to college. So those that so make it to college are probably the most ambitious and intelligent, and probably come from the most supportive families. Basically, only the best of the best is making are on the charts.
Among other groups, it’s more routine for even mediocre students to go to college, and families send kids to college as matter of course… so you are seeing the results of a wider range of students and families.
A lot of the barriers to success are had stops, not a gentle curve.
Do you know a trusted adult who has gone to college who can walk you through things like “how to register for classes?” Are you expected to be a caregiver for younger siblings or other family member? Are you savvy enough to avoid shady for-profits that directly target the poor? Is there large enough college-bound cohort at your high school that you can join in, increasing your chances of choosing a school that is a good fit?
This is similar to what I was thinking. Picture your typical Asian immigrant family who work hard but at best are lower middle class.
But their kids are told from kindergarden that they are going to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc. These immigrant parents are busting their butts to send their child to college, there is NO WAY that child is allowed major in social sciences. Heck no.
Contrast with typical middle-middle class American family. They are not nearly as driven (due to cultural differences or lack of experience with extreme poverty) and may not put the same kind of pressures on their children to pick high-income occupations.
But at all quintiles, the blue bars are about college graduates. So this would not apply to them.
Hermitian, I hear you; but why is there such a sharp contrast between the college graduates from the bottom quintile and those from the second quintile? We would expect, after all, for those graduates from the bottom quintile to be even more exceptional than any of the others, due to the difficulty of what they achieved: creme de la creme.
And obviously quintiles are not sharply delineated like race or religion or gender, and each represents a relatively large chunk of the population. What would we find if we could see this information in deciles? For there to be this great a difference between two adjacent quintiles implies that the difference between the bottom decile and the third or fourth must be even more stark.
Are they? Or did they go to college on sports scholarships, get a degree without actually being prepared for a professional life and never make it to the pros? I think there will be some of both in that fifth quintile, but are there more of the second type in that one than in the others?
Not sure if that’s true. Reading the appendix, the chart is based on 2736 children total. Of those, 23% are college graduates.
So there should be about 547 people per quintile, of which about 126 are college graduates. However, as you might expect, both college enrollment and [url = Education Pays – College Board Research]college completion rates are lower for children from lower income families, so the number of college graduates from both the bottom and second quartiles are almost certainly lower than 126, and probably lower than 100. So the magnitudes of the blue bar percentages are being heavily influenced by literally a handful of individuals.
I don’t know if it is so much expectations for high-income occupations/majors, as it’s expectations to excel. In my experience, as you get further from poverty, the explicit expectations morph from being “bust your ass and be successful” to “be happy and make ends meet/provide for your family in a reasonable fashion.” In other words, to a kid from a family of 6 making $40k a year, being successful and making more money than your parents did is the important thing, while to a kid from a family of 4 making $130k a year, the expectation that he’ll come out and make $200k a year isn’t really there- it’s usually ok if that kid makes $50-60k doing what he likes.
That’s not to say that most middle/upper-middle families would be satisfied with a child whose lifelong dream was to be a beach bum, and who realized it, but if someone really, really wanted to be a teacher, they’d probably be cool with it, while that might not be shooting high enough for a very driven poorer student.
Bump, that makes sense but still doesn’t explain the sharp turn in the other direction for the bottom quintile. **Nava **may be on to something there, though. And **zut **makes a good point: even with a large starting sample, the subgroups of subgroups start to get smallish. I wonder if Pew should have questioned this data and either gathered more, or resisted the impulse to slice and dice it so finely. I’d sure be curious to know what the truth is. Does the Census Bureau compile information like this?