In this entry at Wonkblog, the headline caught my attention because I found it implausible. Reading the article, I was surprised to find out that the headline 'Poor kids who do everything right don't do better than rich kids who do everything wrong' changed a touch in the actual story. See if you can spot the difference.
'Even poor kids who do everything right don't do much better than rich kids who do everything wrong.'
Did you see it? The change completely alters the sentence!
If you look at the graph, I think it looks like poor college grads do pretty well. First, let's admit we don't expect every rich high school dropout to be in the bottom quintile, and we don't expect every poor college grad to be in the top. We expect that they move up the ladder not immediately jump to the top.
But if we look, we see that 67% of poor college grads are in the top 3 quintiles, while 81% of rich high school dropouts are in the bottom 3.
Wonkblog points out that there's the same percentage of each group in the bottom quintile. What they don't emphasize is that there are WAY more poor college grads in the top two quintiles than there are rich high school dropouts.
If someone asked me to choose by roll of the dice which group to be in, I'd definitely choose the poor college grad.