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Showing posts from September, 2016

Educational Trends Within 35-and-Up Wealth Quintiles

Previously I wrote about educational composition within under-35 wealth quintiles as a way of testing the reliability of a prison study which used wealth at 20-28 as a marker for class. (Again, I must note that I had much help from Matt Bruenig, both for the idea and the execution.) My main result was that the bottom wealth quintile for 1989 (near when their study was done) was unusually well-educated, thus demonstrating that wealth at a young age is not a reliable marker for class. I thought I would confirm this result by looking at 35-and-up families in the Survey of Consumer Finances. It's the same calculations, just with different families. If the previous hypothesis is correct, in this group we should see a smooth increase in educational attainment with increasing wealth. Here's the chart: As I suspected. Not quite perfect, but very close. Now, just for fun, here are the same time series charts I did for each under-35 wealth quintile in my previous post , but fo

Educational Trends Within Under-35 Wealth Quintiles

Last week, with much help from Matt Bruenig, I wrote a post using microdata analysis of the 1989 Survey of Consumer Finances. Since I have the script, I figure I might as well make full use of it, both for practice and to see what I can find. So for a start, here are some time series trends for educational attainment within income quintiles for under-35 families. Basically what we're doing here is breaking the under-35 population into fifths based on their wealth, determining the educational background of each fifth, and plotting the change over time using the SCF surveys, which are done every three years. (This starts at 1989 and runs through 2013, the most recent survey.) I bet there is a way to cram all this into one graph, but for the time being here are some simple line charts for each income quintile. A few things jump out here. The education level of the top wealth quintile is increasing over time, which makes intuitive sense.  But surely most s