make it than a highest-SES student with bottom-half scores
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High School Sophomore From Highest SES Quartile With A Bottom Half Math Score Has A 56% Of Remaining In Top Half By SES Whereas 10th Grader From Lowest SES Quartile With Top Half Score Has 47% Chance Of Reaching Top Half By SES.
Anthony Carnevale Megan Fasules Michael Quinn and Kathryn Peltier Campbell, “Born To Win, Schooled To Lose: Why Equally Talented Students Don’t Get Equal Chances To Be All They Can Be,” Georgetown University Center On Education And Workforce, 2019, https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/schooled2lose/
“….Less than one third (31%) of tenth graders in the lowest SES quartile earn the income, educational attainment, or occupational prestige to be in the top half of the SES distribution among same-age young adults 10 years later. Meanwhile, 74 percent of young adults whose families were in the highest SES quartile remain in the top SES half as young adults (Figure 16)…..Low-SES students with top-half math scores appear to be more economically mobile than those with bottom scores. However, top math scores alone are not enough to overcome the influence of family SES on economic mobility. Among tenth graders, those from the lowest SES quartile are less likely than their highest SES counterparts to be in the upper SES half after 10 years, regardless of math scores. A tenth grader from the highest SES quartile with bottom-half math scores has a 56 percent chance of remaining in the top half of SES, whereas a tenth grader from the lowest SES quartile with top-half scores has a 47 percent chance of reaching the top half of SES by age 25 (Figure 17).Simply stated, success isn’t based strictly on academic merit: a lowest-SES student with top-half scores is less likely to “make it” than a highest-SES student with bottom-half scores….”
Georgetown study you asked about that found kids from wealthy backgrounds with low test scores were more likely to be well-off by early adulthood than kids from low-income families with high math test scores by a measure of Socioeconomic Status (which is a measure of parental educational attainment, family income, and occupation).
Ed Comment: File this and link it to the study that says that adding the military score eliminates difference in white vs black mobility, which this seems to contradict.The math in this report is hokey. Using only the designator upper and lower half scores rather than the actual score allows large and small differences in scores. For example high-scoring high-SES children probably score much higher on average than high-scoring low-SES children because SES is correlated with scores and scores are in large part hereditary. It is likely the average of the high-scoring low-SES children centers near the mean. So might the average score of the low-scoring high-SES children. The distribution of the 2 groups is very similar despite different SES parents and upbringings. (It may be the case that the 4 bars below are really 3 bars because the two center bars have about the same math scores. So we see very high, near median, and very low.) Without much difference in scores, other variables would come into to play. And high-SES children are more likely to have those variables for the same reasons. Their parent were successful for reasons—extroversion, consciousness, low anxiety, optimism, disproportionately high verbal skills, healthy, strong family environment, supportive culture, good education/apprenticeship, and vice versa.