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Another perspective on it is (one I think Americans are specifically averse to) is that these are all simply correlated to "class," for some definition for class. This is really another way of saying people follow in their parents footsteps.

If you are born into a reference group (parents, uncles, etc.) where most people have children in their early 20s, you are more likely to as well^. It's expected and seems normal. If you are born into reference group where educational achievement, college attendance, profession etc are within some band then you are more likely to find yourself in that band too.

If your reference group is a family and friends circle where college is a rarity, then attending college becomes overachieving. Most people are no overachievers. For others anything less than a top college, higher degree, top-of-your class is underachievement. People do what they feel is expected of them.

This is one of those things that people take for granted in individual cases (like their kids) but not at group levels. IE if you and your wife are highly educated, you expect that your kid will go to college. You don't think his chances are represented by national averages adjusted for income, race and intelligence.

^The parenthood point is a bit of a strange one because cultural shifts have been at work over the last few generations.

A lot of this relates to where people grow up. If nobody in your high school expects to go to college then that's a huge influence. Even something as simple as signing up for the SAT's is simply off the radar. Not to mention things like how much education your parent’s friends and coworkers have.

Income strongly correlates with zip code so it's hard to figure out the 'root' cause such things.

And all these things have circular correlation. Parents, zip code, school mates, family, income, education...

This is why I think 'class' is a useful approximation. It's some sort of fuzzy unit characterised by these things.

> 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.

The Times reported the exact opposite finding a year ago:

> whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. ... About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.

> ... ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-gradu...

The two findings are unrelated.

>> whether someone attends university.

>> whether a student graduates or not

> The key to raising university enrolment among poor students is to provide better education/development opportunities and aspiration.

I'm going to risk calling you out on this, because I think what goes unstated here is that public resources cannot compete with private ones when it comes to education. It's sad to look at Johnny Trust Fund, and see that he is born with a true educational leg up over poor children, and there's really no way around it. If Johnny's parents have the will and motivation to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year educating Johnny, they can. I'm sorry, but no country can compete with that. Even increasing per-pupil spending in public schools to that of the Phillip's Academies is arguably impossible in all but a handful of the top GDP/capita nations, let alone all the private tutoring and traveling and internships that Johnny has access to.

So, yeah, if you manage to educate poorer children as well as wealthy children, they would achieve similar university performance, but getting their educational background to parity with one-another is so far out of the realm of possibility for most nations that I don't think it should even be mentioned.

It's not clear that money per student is the metric that matters.

Parental involvement, for example, is crucial for motivating students, imparting various skills (ie time management, studying) and setting appropriate expectations[1]. This is more a matter of cultural and structural factors. Parents that have the time and motivation to care for their children's education could have a significant effect without worrying about per-student outlays.

Perhaps there's a way to replicate this by restructuring school to provide positive parent-like influences? I don't know, but it's not a matter of throwing money at the problem, one way or another.

[1]: I remember seeing a few studies on this. "Student Motivation: An Overlooked Piece of School Reform" looks like a reasonable overview of the subject: http://www.cep-dc.org/displayDocument.cfm?DocumentID=405#sth...

I don't think I claim that's the only metric that matters. If I did, that was a mistake. Money is a big influencing factor in-terms of saying what kinds of resources a child has access to for their education, because it's simple to turn money into tutoring or other life experiences. But obviously, for example, having parents who themselves are well-educated and understand how to educate children is a resource that can be more valuable than just having parents with money. There are, of course, many many other examples of non-monetary resources that are accessible by some children and not other, though.

They solution I can see to this would be moving away from the conveyer-belt institution-and-teacher centric model of education which makes it impossible to distribute the same educational opportunities to all, solely because the money will attract the resources and teaching talen which will then be trapped within one institution.

If instead we had a model that allowed students to participate in an institituion independant network that created classess and assigned teachers based on smaller resource loads, week long classess as opposed to 2 year long courses, we could have a system that much more easily lends itself to individual needs and gives more freedom to all students regardless of income level. This same problem could also be tackled by bridging the teacher-student polarity. Students are very capable of teaching themselves in small groups and acheiving goals at the same rate as if they were with teachers. By removing the teacher from the model you reduce resource costs hugely.

Here students are giving by the system what they put in. By participating and working with multiple small groups of students we build social skills and open the door for more specialized and specific learning at every level, not just the private school. If the digital revolution needs to shake things up anywhere in education its in the model and class structure.

tl;dr:A system that gets rid of large classess and focuses on connecting students to teach themselves can provide the same(and highly effective) educational opportunities to all (at a very reasonable cost).

We don't have to do as well at educating low income children as some theoretical money-is-no-object family... you;ve got a strawman here:

"Even increasing per-pupil spending in public schools to that of the Phillip's Academies is arguably impossible in all but a handful of the top GDP/capita nations, let alone all the private tutoring and traveling and internships that Johnny has access to."

It is reasonable to expect that we can educate kids at a standard where income doesn't affect outcomes for most folks.

That is an interesting point. I wonder what it would be like if any student could potentially attend any school based on their academic merit simply by making all private and public institutions free to attend if accepted. Of course, this is not realistic because private institutions would probably not exist and the wealthy have other upper-legs that are not related to tuition, such as professional-tutoring, geographic location, and so on. I'm still curious how this would change the data though.

This is why I'm much more in favor of vouchers. From the papers I've read, its a less costly option, encourages/rewards parental involvement, and retains the freedom to choose (and the competition/movement that comes with it).

With vouchers applicable to private schools, you don't have to burden yourself with the entire cost or keep him in a school that he/she is not compatible with. At the very least, vouchers amongst public schools seems like a no brainer but I've met a lot of resistance from some friends that are teachers.

Vouchers don't work as well as you'd expect. The reason is that parents are not rational agents on behalf of their children. Especially parents of lower socioeconomic status tend to value convenience (how close the school is) to the quality of the school.

The effect of vouchers in the real world is that the best schools get a little bit better while the worst ones get a lot worse.

So is there no genetic component to this at all? I see parental income and educational achievement mentioned, but not parental genes.

Kids who got got good genes from their parents are more likely to go to college. And the parents who gave the kids good genes are likely to have high income.

Genetics is the most important ingredient here.

If that were the case you would expect to find that adoption did very weird things to educational attainment in families. And i can't find any evidence to assert that that's the case.

"Genetics is the most important ingredient here." is a pretty extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

See: http://www.nyu.edu/econ/user/bisina/Chapter5_Sacerdote.pdf Excerpt: "Surely it would be difficult to deny that genetic effects matter. Just look at how much more biological siblings resemble each other on education and income than do adoptive siblings."

So maybe genetics is not the most important ingredient, but saying genetics is not relevant to this discussion is astounding. Smarter parents beget smarter kids -- that's not a controversial statement. IQ is heritable to a large extend. Smarter parents tend to be wealthier. (This is not true everywhere, but it is mostly true in the USA, the land of opportunity.) Smarter kids do better in college. That's not a controversial statement either.

I don't know about _most_ important, but genetics is definitely a large factor. Quoting from Heritability of Lifetime Income[1]

> we find that 24% (54%) of the variance of women’s (men’s) lifetime income is due to genetic factors and that the contribution of the shared environment is negligible

The Promises and Pitfalls of Genoeconomics[2] sees similar results, coming up with 46% and 58% heritability in women and men, respectively.

There's plenty of research here. "Heritability of income" is a good search term.

[1] https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/38881/HECER... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3592970/

""Humans are descended from monkeys" / "The Earth goes round the Sun" / … is a pretty extraordinary claim, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Dismissing as "extraordinary" any claim to which you are politically opposed is not good science. (Frankly, the Sagan quote is in itself not good science until you can get everyone to agree on what is "extraordinary".)

Meanwhile, an entirely appropriate riposte to GP would have been: ""Genetics is the most important ingredient here." is a claim, and claims require evidence."

Look at Plomins studies. Home environment has almost zero correlation.

Can you provide any evidence for this assertion? Because the OP provided evidence.

Very well-written. I'm a UK citizen, and although I'm fairly left-wing, the tuition fees really don't bother me. So long as we ensure there's sufficient credit available on good terms, they just aren't a problem.

Your Telegraph article makes the argument that the fees paid by all students allow the universities in England to offer more money in bursaries to the truly disadvantaged. Which contradicts your argument that money isn't important.