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Comment by swatow | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure about that? All the evidence I've ever seen shows a significant payoff to college education. E.g. https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/reg/hearulemaking/2011/c... (which breaks things down by race, which should be a good proxy for coming from a disadvantaged background).

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Please re-read what you just wrote about race and consider whether it might have interpretations other than the one you intended. To me you seem to be asserting that race is a priori indicative of socioeconomic status, rather than the (likely intended, but more nuanced) assertion that a larger portion of minority children will come from lower-earning households.

Second, I don't necessarily accept the argument that "people who go to college make more money" proves that "college is a good investment". For example, this study found that direct transfer of assets and emulation of behaviors exhibited by wealthy parents had a much stronger contribution to the lifetime earnings of children than education level: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9314

Lastly, the article you posted makes it very clear that the earnings gap for Latinos and African Americans is significant (20% or more) and pervasive no matter what level of education they attain.

>Please re-read what you just wrote about race and consider whether it might have interpretations other than the one you intended. To me you seem to be asserting that race is a priori indicative of socioeconomic status, rather than the (likely intended, but more nuanced) assertion that a larger portion of minority children will come from lower-earning households.

The point is simply that the article tells us something about how the benefits of education vary with socioeconomic status, even though it doesn't directly measure it. People might also be interested in the direct effect of race too, even though no one brought it up so far.

>Second, I don't necessarily accept the argument that "people who go to college make more money" proves that "college is a good investment". For example, this study found that direct transfer of assets and emulation of behaviors exhibited by wealthy parents had a much stronger contribution to the lifetime earnings of children than education level: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9314

I'm very familiar with this literature, I just any studies at hand that correct for this effect. Also, unless I missed it in the body of the article, the article is not measuring the effect of education per se, but the how much education accounts for the elasticity between wealth of parents and wealth of children (i.e. to what extent education explains this effect). I know the results I showed aren't conclusive, they are just all I have on hand. I'm happy to see more evidence on the payoff to education for low SES groups.

>Lastly, the article you posted makes it very clear that the earnings gap for Latinos and African Americans is significant (20% or more) and pervasive no matter what level of education they attain. Yes, but I don't think this really changes the argument.

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