Dressing a story in random data does not make it a fact-based story

There has been a hot trade in the social justice league of late in the idea that society is organized to obstruct the upward mobility of various victim groups. One argument made with some frequency is that the upper class in general, and elite universities in particular, are hoarding opportunities in a fashion which preclude non-traditional groups from moving in.

But as data from the IRS indicates, America really is the land of opportunity with individuals rising in a single generation from the bottom to the top and falling from the top to the bottom at various points in their life.

The issue is not so much opportunity as being able to hold on to achievements and income and wealth. People have their moments of success but they are challenged to sustain that success over stretches of time. Gregory Clark has discovered remarkably stable levels of inequality crossing multiple generations over centuries.

Charles Murray, in Coming Apart, argues empirically that this sustenance of inequality is primarily a product of folkways - marriage, education attainment, no children before marriage, no divorce, low time discounting, church attendance, innovation and considered risk taking, high-value profession selection, etc. Deirdre McCloskey makes much the same point in her Bourgeoise Virtues books.

But the social justice league labor on, trying to muster the data to support their view. Usually with cherry-picked, highly selected data. This is the latest entry in such arguments, The Ivy League Students Least Likely to Get Married by Kevin Carey.

There is no doubt that stable marriages are a huge multiplier in terms of psychological, social and financial well-being. High IQ is a pretty good multiplier as well, most especially when in combination with the ordinary bourgeoise virtues.

The data come from the Equality of Opportunity Project, which followed the economic and educational progress of Americans born between 1980 and 1991. For each year, researchers tracked who went to which college, how much money their parents made, and whether they were married in 2014.

Marriage rates for young adults just out of college are low across the board. But as people get into their 30s, trends diverge. For example, more than half of Princeton students born into upper-income households in the early 1980s — roughly, the classes of 2002 through 2006 — were married by 2014. They didn’t all marry other Princetonians, of course, but it’s common.

But for Princeton alumni from the lowest-income households — the bottom one-fifth compared with the top one-fifth — the trends are different. Only a third were married by 2014. This pattern holds for other elite colleges and universities. For people born over the five years from 1980 to 1984, the marriage rate for upper-income students who attended Ivy League institutions was 14 percentage points higher than the rate for lower-income students.

Aha! Princeton has social systems that reduces the chances of bottom quintile income students from integrating and marrying at the same rates as those children from the top quintile. Well, maybe. The fact that some other prestigious institutions such as University of Chicago has nearly identical marriage rates between top and bottom suggests that there must be something else going on beyond simple exclusive social systems at elite universities which is what the social justice advocates need it to be.

Carey offers a case study of a bottom quintile student as an example.

Alana Tornello, Princeton class of 2012, grew up in a working-class community on Staten Island. Her mother ran a small hair salon where Ms. Tornello spent her afternoons after school. Her father was a social worker. She tested into a specialized high school and applied to Princeton on a whim. When the acceptance letter arrived on April 1, she thought someone was pulling her leg.

Those doubts followed her onto campus, where she struggled academically her freshman year. The Princeton social scene revolves around “eating clubs,” to which people apply for membership, much like rushing a fraternity or sorority. The clubs, mostly housed in a row of imposing old mansions next to campus, are implicitly part of extensive social networks connected to exclusive private boarding schools and families with multiple generations of Princeton alumni. Eating clubs are where many upper-income marriages begin.

Ms. Tornello didn’t feel at home there. And while Princeton gave her a generous scholarship, the eating clubs were still expensive. She decided to be an “independent” — the telling label for students who didn’t eat at a club. “If you were independent,” she said, “you were kind of seen as a lone dog.”

Sounds like Tornello might possibly have suffered from social exclusion which might have possibly reduced her marriage chances. Possible, but is that the most likely explanation? Carey admits:

Ms. Tornello thought she’d study something “practical” at Princeton, like engineering or pre-med. Instead, she fell in love with her humanities courses and majored in comparative literature. In her spare time, she became interested in faith-based organizing. After graduation and a short stint in Washington, D.C., she moved back to Staten Island to help with Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. Today, she lives with six housemates in Brooklyn and recently started work in emergency planning and operations for a city agency. There are a lot of other Princeton graduates nearby, many commuting to Wall Street. She leads a different kind of life.

Ms. Tornello has mixed feelings about the path she chose. “You don’t quite belong anymore to where you’re from,” she said. “But I also didn’t belong at Princeton. There’s a meaning in my life that I can’t deny was created by my time there. I traveled the world from Princeton. I’m not in a better place than my family financially, but I have something I wish they had, too.”

After setting up the argument that Tornello's unmarried status is a function of social exclusion, Carey then introduces evidence that 1) Tornello is doing exactly what she wants and 2) what she wants to do is not associated with high income/wealth/status attainment with their corresponding linkages to marriage.

Carey wants to conclude, per the social justice fad, that

Instead of being places that provide equal opportunity to everyone based on merit, colleges are often complicit in the forces that push us apart.

Much as he might want that to be the conclusion, he makes it really hard to see that that proposition is in fact true. Elite universities have widely varying rates of marriage differential between their bottom and top quintiles. Many elite universities have close to zero variation. Personal behaviors and choices of career and field of endeavor have a huge impact on marriage opportunities.

And that is to say nothing about some pretty obvious multivariate confounders. People from top quintile households, on average, are far more likely to grow up in intact families compared to those in the bottom quintile. Perhaps pre-existing social norms from their childhood is driving the marriage differentials. You need to hold originating family structure and other such folkways constant to compare differences in like-to-like circumstances of income quintiles.

At most elite universities, students originating from bottom quintile circumstances are also highly likely to have been special admits (sports, race, under-represented, etc.) who correspondingly tend to have dramatically lower standardized test scores compared to their academic peers. Since IQ combined with normed folkways is predictive of outcomes, you also need to control for test scores between the quintiles.

Perhaps there are field of study differences between top and bottom quintile student groups, one gravitating towards challenging and high compensation professions (ex. electrical engineering or finance) and the other gravitating towards low income fields of study (ex. comparative literature or sociology.) If bottom quintile students are choosing to pursue low income professions, then the fact that low income professions are associated with reduced marriageability becomes pertinent.

Those are just three of the more obvious confounders between top and bottom quintile. The fact that Carey did not control for those obvious variables makes his conclusion even less supportable.

There is data. There is a table. There is jargon. But this has all the hallmarks of a conclusion seeking the appearance of empirical support. Carey has not made much of an effort to actually make his empirical argument. He has not controlled his variables. He has not dealt with the exceptions to his alleged pattern. He has not illustrated his article with a very convincing case study.

I am actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that most elite universities are far more interested in appearing to be socially just than they are interested in actually being socially just. Despite that disposition, Carey is unconvincing.

Which is a pity because pursuing social justice solutions does not solve real world problems for people. You cannot simply assume causes into existence, no matter what they taught in the intersectional social justice postmodernism classes. University of Texas had an interesting exercise going a number of years ago. They observed that their admits from the bottom quintile were accruing higher debt, were less likely to graduate, and were having worse post-graduation outcomes. They put together a holistic team to track such students to discover the real pitfalls and provided structured and testable interventions. They were having some good success in reducing the quintile disparities. And their solutions had nothing to do with eating clubs or social exclusion or mystical forms of class prejudice.

Solving real problems through fact based interventions. An approach so radical, it just might work.