Nature, Nurture, Trust Funds

The administration's secretary for blogging, Peter Orszag, has a nice post today on "the case for reform in education and health care." Matt Yglesias summarizes (with charts!):

[F]amily income has a big influence here. Two thirds of the kids with average math scores and low-income parents wind up not going to college, while almost two-thirds of high-income kids with average math scores do go. And as he shows in the following slide, parental income also has a strong impact on college completion...

This, in turn, has a substantial impact on a person's long-term economic prospects as seen in our country's large and growing wage premium...

The truly amazing thing to me is that parental income isn't just crucial in getting to college, and getting through college -- its effects linger on, basically, in perpetuity. One of the most remarkable findings from the Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project is that a child from a family in the top income quintile who does not get a college degree is more likely to wind up in the top income quintile himself than a child from a family in the bottom income quintile who does get a college degree (see here -- PDF).

Bootstraps these days just aren't as sturdy as they used to be.