Travis County among nation’s worst for economic mobility (Austin: school, college)

[scm53]

Compared with an average U.S. county, children who grow up in Travis County tend to see lower future earnings.

Before the cries for more spending start, it is across all economic levels:

Travis County had a deleterious exposure effect on kids regardless of their parents’ income, the study found. By the time they reached 26 years old, children who grew up in high-income Travis County families saw their annual household incomes curbed by about $2,900 — roughly $145 a year — compared with the average U.S. county.

So if you love your kids, move out of Travis County.

[Trainwreck20]

OTOH, did the Travis County kids end up happier than kids that ended up with more money?

[Novacek]

Originally Posted by scm53

Compared with an average U.S. county, children who grow up in Travis County tend to see lower future earnings.

Before the cries for more spending start, it is across all economic levels:



So if you love your kids, move out of Travis County.

Income, huh?

What's the CoL adjusted income. Or the tax-adjusted income?

Any "study" that just compares incomes nationwide and doesn't adjust for factors like those is worthless.

[BoxOChocolates]

Household income at 26 seems an odd metric on which to base an upward mobility study. This penalizes kids who have not married by this age. It severely penalizes kids who pursue careers that require advanced degrees (MD, JD, PhD).

[hoffdano]

I have a hard time making sense of these findings. I wonder how they got their data. How could they have captured the incomes of people scattered across Texas or the US and their locations while growing up?

Or is this isolated to people who grew up in a county and stayed there to at least the age of 26?

It seems implausible that a kid graduating from Westlake, Westwood, Lake Travis etc. that went to college is earning less than national averages at 26. I can see how lower income kids have a different outcome. But how did they get their data? Is it adjusted for COL?

[centralaustinite]

Yes, the best Central Texas county for their metric seems to be Bastrop! although their school quality is improving, I don't see how Bastrop education makes a difference.

BoxOChocolates makes a good point about income at age 26. It does seem to be an odd metric. I had just married at that age and we were both in grad school. I had a prestigious grant but even so, our combined income was barely $20,000! Twenty years later, however, it is a very different story.

Whereas a Bastrop HS grad who was working the trades or even entry level office work would have had a much higher income at 26.

[10scoachrick]

Specious
Spurious

Two vocabulary words for the day.

[Aquitaine]

Too many graduate students + not enough genuinely interesting fields = studies whose only function is to get attention.

[scm53]

For all of the dear readers obsessing on the bark patterns of the first tree you encounter, and missing the fact there is an entire forest before you, consider this fact:

There is a income differential of at least $5,800/yr between kids raised in Lee County than Travis County, and it is evident across all income percentiles. It is aggregated data -- individual choices are meaningless. It is based on current residence, against national averages. Again, individual situations are meaningless in aggregated data.

The salient question is why? Why do kids raised in the thriving metropolis of Giddings have higher incomes at 26 than kids raised in the coolest, most enlightened place in the entire world - Austin, by gawd?

This is like a fire warning light in an airplane. It just points to a problem, not the cause, or the solution. Nitpicking about the reliability of a heat fire sensor versus a pneumatic fire sensor, when you are on fire, is the wrong thing to concentrate on. That data points to a problem, and pointless pedantic distractions just mean that you are still on fire.

[austin-steve]

I read that article this morning and immediately dismissed it as a bunch of gobbledygook. Sometimes when you read something and, on it's face, it doesn't compute or make sense, it's because it is in fact a boatload of crap.

From the study: "According to the study and data, children who spent their entire 20-year upbringing in an average-income Travis County family would’ve made $2,540 more a year by age 26 if they’d grown up in the average American county."

What? Oh brother. Prove it. What a load of dung. That's the worst conclusion I've ever read.

Reading a bit deeper (on the study website) to try to understand what they are trying to measure and how they do it, you find that they follow kids from age 9 forward. I'd say by age 9, the kid's outcome has already been baked in based on family life and education to that point. So, poor kids from lower 25% income families don't make much progress by the time they are 26? Uh, ok. How is that caused by the County in which they grow up?

I think instead of County, it should be broken out by ISD and zipcodes. And instead of just family income, the composition of the family i.e. single moms versus mom and dad, etc. They don't track race at all, and unfortunately that's also going to be a big factor. The whole thing just seems like a really bad 101 project done by college Freshmen. But since the researchers are from Harvard, it gets press.

Eh, the information we receive through the media nowadays is the equivilent of junk/garbage food. Empty calories. Filling, but no real value.

Steve