Culture and Academic Success

In the New Republic, Brink Lindsey explores why low-income Americans tend not to go to college.  Based on his review of the relevant studies, it's more about culture than money:

A lack of money is the most common explanation for why lower-income children don't go to college, and it's the impetus for proposals, like those put forward by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, to increase tuition subsidies. But James Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from the University of Chicago, is convinced that additional subsidies would do little good. Heckman recognizes the strong correlation between family income and college matriculation, but he argues that income is just a proxy for more fundamental differences in family and environmental conditions — like parental education — that ultimately show up in test scores and scholastic achievement. In a 2001 study co-authored with Stephen Cameron from Columbia University, Heckman tested the attendance gap between blacks, whites, and Hispanics, controlling for academic ability using scores from the Armed Forces Qualification Test (afqt), and found that family income did not really matter when it came to getting kids into college. In fact, "at the same afqt level Blacks and Hispanics enter college at rates that are substantially higher than the White rate," regardless of how much money their families made. The problem was that relatively few blacks and Hispanics reached a sufficiently high afqt level in the first place. In other words, the main reason fewer African Americans and Hispanics go to college isn't that they can't afford it. It's that they lack the skills to do the work.

And here's where culture comes in:

To put it in a nutshell, the upper-middle-class kid grows up in an environment that constantly pushes him to develop the cognitive and motivational skills needed to be a good student; the low-income kid's environment, on the other hand, pushes in the opposite direction.

Child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley have tested the effect of class on the differences in how parents interact with their young children. After observing several dozen families with toddlers over the course of a couple of years, they were able to document dramatic differences in the intensity and nature of the verbal stimulation the kids were getting: Professional parents directed an average of 487 "utterances" per hour toward their children, as compared to 301 for workingclass parents and only 176 for welfare parents. The quality of those utterances was also very different: Among professional parents, the ratio of encouraging to discouraging utterances was six to one; for working-class parents, the ratio slipped to two to one; and welfare parents made two discouraging utterances for every encouraging one. The consequences were predictable: By the time the children in the study were around three years old, the ones from professional families had average vocabularies of 1,116 words; the working-class ones averaged 749; the welfare kids, 525.

There is a lot more -- read the whole thing here.