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> Also there should be a high correlation between kids being college-material and parents being college-material. Whether you believe in nature (genetics) or nurture (good parenting, high standards, role model, access to education, etc), or a mix of both, either way, you should not expect the % of college students from graduate families to match the % of graduate families in the country. So not sure what point the article makes

Just because something can easily be explained using logic doesn't mean that it's outcomes can't be negative. Perhaps this indicates that our society is further stratifying into different classes and upward mobility is being reduced for a portion of the population which I think most people would agree is a bad thing

I'm not sure it suggests that society is stratifying, though. People didn't go to college nearly so much prior to the 70s. Once college became ubiquitous, I would expect that the number of people who's parents went to college could have to go up no matter what. ie, there is a smaller and smaller pool of people who's parents did not go to college since the 1970s. I'm not even suggesting that society is not stratifying; I just don't think this is proof of it.

"caste", the word you are looking for is "caste". It's not just a difference in incomes, it's a closed system for reproduction (college educated often meet their future spouse in college, and even if not are rarely willing to marry non-college educated). Closed system for reproduction plus inheritance (genetic and cultural both) is the predecessor to castes, given a few more generations of this kind of separation.

Except “first generation college student” is still very much a thing.

It doesn't scale like that, though. If the % of people with college degrees had increased by 6x, to 24%, would you expect 6/5 of students to have parents with a college degree?

Not exactly like that, but close. As % of people with college degrees approaches 100%, all students will have parents with a college degree, so it will approach 5/5. The logic in the parent comment still stands.

What you care about is how much more likely a person with parents who had degrees is to have a degree over one who doesn't.

In 1970 4% of people had degrees and 20% of degree holders had parents with degrees. That means that children of degree holders got 5 times as many degrees as children of non-degree holders.

In 2020 14% of people have degrees and 66% of degree holders have parents with degrees. That means that children of degree holders got 4.7 times as many degrees as children of non-degree holders.

Which is the opposite of what the article assumes.

You don't create outrage, and thus clicks, with honest reporting of facts or by applying elementary-school-level math.

% of degree holders as a population vs % parents of people with degrees is misleading - trend for getting degrees as a % of population is increasing and parents with degrees is lagging by around 10-20 years (ie. it will be 10-20 years before all the people that have degrees now can have children old enough to attain a degree).

So even if this probability reduces to 4 times more as likely, the % of population with degrees keeps increasing you'll see the pattern article is describing.

Yes and?

The point is that if anything degrees now provide less generational predictability than they used to 50 years ago.

The article is trying to argue the exact opposite.

> That means that children of degree holders got 4.7 times as many degrees as children of non-degree holders.

That doesn't follow at all? You can't just divide the two percentages and get that conclusion?

In 2020 children of degree holders got twice as many degrees as children from non-degree holders; 66 vs 34. In 1970 children of degree holders got 1/4 as many degrees as children of non-degree holders; 20 vs 80.

Edit: removed math based on wrong assumption

>If you put it in absolute numbers. In 1970 among 1000 people 40 had degrees and of those 40 20% so 8 people had parents with degrees. On the other side you have 32 degree holders to 960 non degree holder parents, so just 3.3% of their kids got degrees.

>In 2020 among 1000 people 200 had degrees and of those 200 66% so 132 people had parents with degrees. On the other side you have 68 degree holders to 800 non degree holder parents, so just 8.5% of their kids got degrees.

You're confusing the total number of people who have degrees with new graduates. The only thing we can calculate with the numbers given is the ratio of new graduates who have parents with degrees to those who have parents without degrees.

> You're confusing the total number of people who have degrees with new graduates.

Yes you're right. The original data said new graduates. I got sidetracked by the formulation in your comment. I removed the false calculation.

> The only thing we can calculate with the numbers given is the ratio of new graduates who have parents with degrees to those who have parents without degrees.

Yea that ratio is 2 and 1/4 respectively? I don't even know how to put in words what we get by dividing the percentage of new grads with degree holding parents by the percentage of degree holders with college age children among the general population. Nothing useful?

It doesn't work like that because you need to include the rates of people who have a degree and whos parent's don't.

CD = Child has a degree PD = Parent has a degree

Your rates would be calculated with P(CD|PD)/P(CD|notPD) = [4x20/(4x80+96A)]/[4x80/(4x80+96(100-A))] where A = Probability of parent having a degree and child not having degree

This is wrong. By this logic, "25% of people have degrees and 100% of degree holders have parents with degrees" is better than the 4%/20%, because it's only 4 times instead of 5 times. One of the better methods would be to calculate the "Bayes factor"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes_factor) for estimating possibility of holding degree given the evidence of "parents holding degree". In this case, we need to know the parents degree percentage for both people in 1970 and 2020.

The math is trickier than that:

- If 4% of parents have degrees, something like 7% of the next generation has at least one parent with a degree. Because children have two parents, and only one of those two parents needs to have a degree. So the correct number to compare 20% against is ~7%, not 4%.

- Suppose a child of a degree-holder is 3 times as likely to become an economics PhD as a child of no degree-holders. Then, if 7% of children have a degree-holding parent, you would expect (7 * 3) / (7 * 3 + 93) = 21 / 114 = ~18.4% of economics PhDs to have a degree-holding parent, not 21%. If 25% of children have a degree-holding parent, you'd expect (25 * 3) / (25 * 3 + 75) = 75 / 150 = 50% of economics PhDs to have a degree-holding parent, not 75%.

Eyeballing the last few numbers, it does look like the value of having a degree-holding parent may have increased significantly, from a ~3.3x multiplier to almost 6x. But the error bars on this back-of-the-napkin analysis are pretty wide.

> If 4% of parents have degrees, something like 7% of the next generation has at least one parent with a degree.

Are you presuming marriage and degree-holding are independent variables? Although I presume there are fewer female degree holders, so perhaps it makes little difference.

>Although I presume there are fewer female degree holders, so perhaps it makes little difference.

Since ~80s there are more female undergraduate students than male.

EDIT: with graduate degrees it got equal just in 2005. Which is relatively close to the age of current students...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/185167/number-of-doctora...

“Something like 7%” is noticeably less than twice 4%, so no, I didn’t make that assumption. (I also explicitly stated that this was a back-of-the-napkin-quality analysis.)

It is noticeably closer to 8% than to 4% though. 7% would imply graduates exhibit a rather strong preference for marrying non-graduates over other graduates, which I find hard to believe.

At a time when only 4% of the population had graduate degrees, if 25% of married grad-degree-holders were married to another grad-degree-holder, that would constitute a large preference in favor of other graduates.

For simplicity let’s assume a static equilibrium (i.e. the rate of degree holders doesn’t change across cohorts and people don’t marry outside of their class).

Obviously in such case the probability to get a degree if your parents have a degree are 20% (in 1970) and 66% (in 2020).

Now let’s calculate the probabilities to get a degree if your parents don’t have a degree:

1970: 0.04*0.8/0.96 = 3.33%

2020: 0.14*0.34/0.86 = 5.53%

Even a “whooping” 1.7 increase doesn’t make much of a difference.

The 1970 stats are just saying that of the 4% of people who held a degree, 20% had parents who also had a degree (the 20% is a subset of the 4%, the 2 numbers are not directly comparable). This in fact means that graduates-with-degreed-parents were rarer than graduates without.

This situation has changed when we look at 2020. The overall number of degree holders is still relatively low compared to overall population (14%) but of this number a full 2/3rds now have degreed parents. The situation within this group has reversed.

I guess like plenty of bounded processes in nature, this is likely a sigmoid-ish function where close to zero you can approximate the function linearly. Yet yeah, there is some error.

It's an oversimplification of course, but let's try another oversimplification just for argument's sake and to highlight the mechanism.

Let's say you are born without parents, and your parents get picked at random once you enter university (a completely fair system in that there is no bias involved).

If 4% of all "available" parents have a degree, your chance that you'll get at least one of those "assigned" to you is 7.84% (1 - ((1 - 0.04)^2)).

If 14% of all parents have one, this probability rises to 26.04% (1 - ((1 - 0.14)^2)).

I had the same thoughts. The country is now more educated than it was before, and they want to paint that as a bad thing. And point some fingers at the “elite,” Which is now people who’s parents have a college degree I guess.

And realistically we are at point where having a degree doesn't make you an "elite" anymore. Not necessarily even having PhD... The value of degrees has also inflated.

> value of degrees has also inflated

Nitpick: the degree has inflated. Its value has decreased. If something’s value inflates its price has deflated.

Nope. Value is not a function of cost. Value is just a measure of utility. Not utils per dollar.

> and they want to paint that as a bad thing

I would think it's obvious to anyone that the bad thing is the creation of a caste system and lack of social mobility.

Doesn’t the increase in degrees indicate that there is social mobility?

If a graduate degree is not in some sense an elite marker something is messed up. A graduate degree should guarantee the holder could be admitted into a decent doctoral programme. Obviously this isn’t true, education schools exist, but it should be. If graduate school isn’t for an educational elite the material should be in a Bachelor’s.

Well, most of the press is desperate to find a new big bad to generate clicks… and the in the case of the Washington Post to make us forget that they were the ones that gave a column to Amber Heard

I think your analysis mixes up college degrees and graduate degrees. 'College degree' refers to a 4-year BA/BS, whereas 'graduate degree' typically refers to a PhD, Master's degree, or professional degree (JD/MD/MBA).

Postgraduate education in UK etcetera means graduate education in North America - as per https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postgraduate_education

The quotes from the article seem to be using graduate in the US sense, which is what would be called post-grad in NZ.

FYI, AFAIK college degree or professional degree means little in New Zealand, and probably not the UK either.

Also see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undergraduate_degree

I'm just saying that to people outside the US, the article is unclear because the words mean different things in different countries, which could affect some commenters.

Disclaimer: I only know what we call degrees in NZ so I am just trying to say why people from different countries could be confused. And this comment probably is confused itself, sorry.

In the UK you do GCSEs about age 16, A-Levels about age 18 (there are some vocational certificates too), both while typically living at home.

You then typically go away for a Bachelor degree which lasts 3-4 years and gives you a BSc, BA or similar. After that you might do a Masters degree which would be 1 year (full time) which gives you an MSc/MA, then you'd start a doctorate which takes several years before getting a PhD

At 16 people leave that track and do formal qualifications in more vocational areas (bricklaying, farming, etc), at 18 people who didn't do vocational training from 16 may leave, a gap year is quite popular at that point, where you have a year off and travel the world.

Most people who do BA/BSc level courses will finish after graduation, typically age 21-23 (depending on gap year and length of course). Some stay direct on, plenty of people do Masters remotely part time later in their careers.

Yeah GP seems to be missing something. PhD programs at top schools are somewhat hereditary at this point. It’s so competitive and there’s too much stuff to just know how to do; spending time with a family member who’s done it before is a huge leg up vs. figuring it out on your own.

It's also an extremely stupid thing to do financially, in almost every case. There are intangible benefits to it, but you need someone coaching you on them in order to accept the choice to actually halve (or more) your income. (Take it from a 2nd generation PhD who has halved his salary being a professor vs. working in industry.)

Hasn’t the number of college degrees basically ballooned since the 70s?

Isn’t this like saying, “The number of professors whose parents have a car is up 3x since the 1930s?”

This article’s point is that economist graduates now are more likely to have come from a parent who is also an economics grad than compared to other points in time and against other graduate programs.

"Academia in general — and economics in particular", claims the article.

> So % of parents with college degree increased by 3.5x (from 4% to 14%) and % of students coming from parents with college degree increased 3.3x (from 1/5 to 2/3). That more than explains it, doesn't it?

Just wait until percentage of parent with a degree reaches 25%. Then you'll see 120% of students having a parent with a degree. Hope that your explanation that "everything is normal" will still hold then.

> Whether you believe in nature (genetics) or nurture

...or nepotism, which is known to be extremely common in both academia and among billionaires.