andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1688 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Theodore Vasiloudis writes: I came upon this article by Laura Hamilton, an assistant professor in the University of California at Merced, that claims that “The more money that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.” I can’t help but feel that there something wrong with the basis of the study or a confounding factor causing this apparent correlation, and since you often comment on studies on your blog I thought you might find this study interesting. My reply: I have to admit that the description above made me suspicious of the study before I even looked at it. On first thought, I’d expect the effect of parent’s financial contributions to be positive (as they free the student from the need to get a job during college), but not negative. Hamilton argues that “parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement,” which may be—but I’m generally suspicious of arguments in which the rebound is bigger than the main effect.
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Theodore Vasiloudis writes: I came upon this article by Laura Hamilton, an assistant professor in the University of California at Merced, that claims that “The more money that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn. [sent-1, score-0.54]
2 ” I can’t help but feel that there something wrong with the basis of the study or a confounding factor causing this apparent correlation, and since you often comment on studies on your blog I thought you might find this study interesting. [sent-2, score-0.243]
3 My reply: I have to admit that the description above made me suspicious of the study before I even looked at it. [sent-3, score-0.183]
4 On first thought, I’d expect the effect of parent’s financial contributions to be positive (as they free the student from the need to get a job during college), but not negative. [sent-4, score-0.418]
5 Hamilton argues that “parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement,” which may be—but I’m generally suspicious of arguments in which the rebound is bigger than the main effect. [sent-5, score-0.546]
6 So I clicked through to the study and indeed found a problem, and it’s the one you might expect if you follow this sort of thing. [sent-6, score-0.176]
7 Hamilton regresses college grades on the amount parents spent on college, and finds a negative correlation: more parental spending is associated with lower grades. [sent-7, score-1.135]
8 ” If you’re not doing so well in college but it’s being paid for, you might stay. [sent-9, score-0.285]
9 This would induce the negative correlation in the data, but not at all through the causal story that Hamilton is telling, that students who are parentally-supported “dial down their academic efforts. [sent-11, score-0.528]
10 You really really shouldn’t control for whether a student is working during school, if you’re trying to estimate the effect of parental support. [sent-16, score-0.72]
11 Hamilton also performs an analysis on a different dataset including within-student comparisons when student aid varied over time. [sent-17, score-0.413]
12 This is fine but it has the same problem that it doesn’t seem that students get counted after they drop out. [sent-18, score-0.246]
13 Again, an observed correlation does not necessarily correspond to a causal effect—and I don’t say this in a vague “correlation does not equal causation” sense but more specifically that there’s a clear selection problem going on here (as well as a comparison conditional on intermediate outcomes). [sent-19, score-0.55]
14 Hamilton writes, “These results provide strong evidence that selectivity processes are not driving the negative relationship between parental aid and GPA,” but I don’t see it. [sent-20, score-0.664]
15 As a side note, I’m slightly bothered by this graph from the paper: I mean, sure, a graph is better than a table full of numbers such as “-11. [sent-21, score-0.14]
16 A footnote says, “The funds needed to provide parental aid can come from a variety of sources . [sent-27, score-0.686]
17 Parents may thus offer funds that exceed income earned in a given year. [sent-30, score-0.196]
18 And, when it does, I’d expect the impact on the student to be different from funds supplied by a richer family. [sent-32, score-0.498]
19 I can’t imagine it feels so much like free money to a student if parents are paying more for college than they (the parents) make in a year. [sent-33, score-0.972]
20 I’m surprised the reviewers for the American Sociological Review didn’t catch these problems, which are pretty standard issues in causal inference: survivorship bias and controlling for intermediate variables. [sent-35, score-0.401]
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Introduction: Theodore Vasiloudis writes: I came upon this article by Laura Hamilton, an assistant professor in the University of California at Merced, that claims that “The more money that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.” I can’t help but feel that there something wrong with the basis of the study or a confounding factor causing this apparent correlation, and since you often comment on studies on your blog I thought you might find this study interesting. My reply: I have to admit that the description above made me suspicious of the study before I even looked at it. On first thought, I’d expect the effect of parent’s financial contributions to be positive (as they free the student from the need to get a job during college), but not negative. Hamilton argues that “parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement,” which may be—but I’m generally suspicious of arguments in which the rebound is bigger than the main effect.
Introduction: A couple months ago, the students in our Teaching Statistics class practiced one-on-one tutoring. We paired up the students (most of them are second-year Ph.D. students in our statistics department), with student A playing the role of instructor and student B playing the role of a confused student who was coming in for office hours. Within each pair, A tried to teach B (using pen and paper or the blackboard) for five minutes. Then they both took notes on what worked and what didn’t work, and then they switched roles, so that B got some practice teaching. While this was all happening, Val and I walked around the room and watched what they did. And we took some notes, and wrote down some ideas: In no particular order: Who’s holding the pen? Mort of the pairs did their communication on paper, and in most of these cases, the person holding the pen (and with the paper closest to him/herself) was the teacher. That ain’t right. Let the student hold the pen. The student’s the on
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Introduction: Theodore Vasiloudis writes: I came upon this article by Laura Hamilton, an assistant professor in the University of California at Merced, that claims that “The more money that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.” I can’t help but feel that there something wrong with the basis of the study or a confounding factor causing this apparent correlation, and since you often comment on studies on your blog I thought you might find this study interesting. My reply: I have to admit that the description above made me suspicious of the study before I even looked at it. On first thought, I’d expect the effect of parent’s financial contributions to be positive (as they free the student from the need to get a job during college), but not negative. Hamilton argues that “parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement,” which may be—but I’m generally suspicious of arguments in which the rebound is bigger than the main effect.
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