You Draw It: How Family Income Predicts Children’s College Chances

The New York Times published this piece in its Upshot section on 28 May 2015.¹ It asks how likely children from poor and from rich families are to go to college, and before showing anything it asks the reader to answer by drawing.¹

The chart is empty except for one point given free: 58 percent of children born in the early 1980s and raised in median-income families enrolled in higher education by age 21.¹ The reader draws a line through that point across every family-income percentile.¹ The text first sketches some shapes the reader might expect. A flat line means the chances are the same for everyone. Others are harsh for the poorest and higher above them, level off past some income, or spike or dip for the very richest.¹ When the reader presses "I'm done", the real line appears over theirs, followed by a chart of what other Times readers drew.¹

The real relationship is close to a straight line: each step up one income percentile makes enrolling about 0.7 percentage points more likely, all the way up.¹ The authors write that they would have guessed, as many readers did, that the relationship would be more nuanced.¹ The data come from research by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez based on the earnings records of millions of families; each dot on the chart is one income percentile and stands for nearly 100,000 children.¹

The piece explains why it asks for a drawing. Drawing the line makes the reader think carefully about the relationship first. The authors expected that to make the straight line more of a surprise.¹ The reader commits to a belief before seeing the data, then sees exactly where it was wrong.