It seems to me that high educational attainment COULD represent some underlying (heritable) trait-- such as curiosity, verbal learning style, etc.

High educational attainment, of course, is also a loose proxy for higher SES, too.

But maybe the underlying mechanism is about language enrichment in the birth-to-four age range. That would explain outliers in both the high and low SES groups (that is, impoverished but highly educated immigrant groups with VERy high achieving children, and the occasional 'Superior Snooty-Highhorse the seventh' legacy kid with high sense of entitlement as a defining characteristic).

That's entirely consistent with the premise in the original editorial I posted.

Another thing that I wonder-- and this is another thing that correlates highly with SES and with language, probably-- is childcare environments.

That is, do children who have parents or other caregivers in very low child-to-adult ratios wind up better off? They do, right? So what kinds of childcare settings are mostly available for people at the lowest end of the SES? Not that kind. They have childcare settings for infants and toddlers that mostly resemble feedlots for human children. Not very enriched in the ways that apparently matter most-- hearing a wide variety of language used by real people around them.


ETA: Oh, and the other thing that occurs to me now that I hit post--

the curve may be obscuring this trend if I'm right because above a certain point in the SES, it is possible for one parent to forgo income in order to parent full-time. In highly educated parent-couples, that is a real zinger, because you're cutting the income of the household effectively by over 1/3, and in some cases by half.

That means that there are households in the middle two quartiles who are there by CHOICE, not by circumstance, and for most purposes, we don't really belong there, but in the upper quartile instead.


Skews things, that. It'd be really interesting to see what emerges when you tease apart HOUSEHOLD income with 'major earner' incomes.

Hmm.

Last edited by HowlerKarma; 05/03/13 09:17 AM.
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.