U.S. not so good in terms of social progress

The folks at the Social Progress Imperative recently underlined via hard data what we pretty well already knew about the quality of living in the U.S. While we are doing well in the aggregate on economic indicators such as GDP, their compendium of non-economic indicators presented in the Social Progress Index finds that we are doing rather poorly in meeting a host of basic human needs.

affluence trumps academic ability in completing college

Elise Gould in a recent Working Economics piece dismantles Charles Murray's assertion that college facilitation programs, such as that afforded by "socioeconomic affirmative action," should not be instituted since the most capable of  poor and working-class youths are already getting into and doing well at top universities under current policies. Her argument, based on a secondary analysis of data from a study conducted by Fox, Connolly, and Snyder (2005), indicates that this is not the case as the proportion of low-income children with the greatest academic potential (as measured by 8th grade test scores) were only about as likely to graduate from college as students from affluent families with low academic potential.