Quote Originally Posted by spoonitnow View Post
But but but mah causation.
Do you really believe that opposite though.

Finishing highschool is an automatic bias in the sample. Even if you took a sample where everyone was equally able and then looked at those who graduated you'd find that bad things make people drop out and have a longer term effect on your life and people that don't face those issues graduate and are less likely to have those issues in the future. It's pretty self fulfilling.

The difference in life quality of those who barely miss out on graduating and those who barely graduate is actually pretty indifferent and that's with a pretty big bias in employment and opportunity to those who do graduate.

The bits about not having children is also interesting. The first point is that good schools in bad areas (which is surprisingly common) combats this. So that would imply that having kids, whilst an issue, isn't that big of a factor. It just turns out that when things are going well you're less likely to have children. This is also an effect which is seen throughout loads of different socioeconomic groups basically across the world.

The next is that, in the UK at least, asian cultures tend to have children at an earlier age and also have more children yet their success rates are also much better than both white and black people when comparing across poorer socioeconomic backgrounds. This has huge amounts to do with the culture that is around for dealing with these things. So once again it's more an effect of negatives than it is the cause of negatives.

You also find that black and ethnic pupils actually tend to do much much better whilst in the later years of education and the progress they make is amongst the best.

There is the affect of people from certain areas being forced to live in worst places and having less when it comes to immigration. This is true of a lot of people who immigrated however you tend to find that the people who have integrated the best in the society have the better results. Now there is an argument that this is down to what you do to intergrate and I agree however how easy it is to single you out as different plays a huge part. If you're 3rd generation Irish immigrant basically no one knows you aren't American, if you're third generation african-american they know you are different. It matters.

The ways you deal with it and how you approach it is a different thing but ignoring it's existence is rubbish.