Question 6.99

6.99 How far do rich parents take us?

How much education children get is strongly associated with the wealth and social status of their parents, termed “socioeconomic status,” or SES. The SES of parents, however, has little influence on whether children who have graduated from college continue their education. One study looked at whether college graduates took the graduate admissions tests for business, law, and other graduate programs. The effects of the parents’ SES on taking the LSAT test for law school were “both statistically insignifcant and small.”

  1. What does “statistically insignifcant” mean?
  2. Why is it important that the effects were small in size as well as statistically insignifcant?

6.99

(a) If SES had no effect on LSAT, there would still be some small differences due to chance variation. Statistically insignificant means that the effect is small enough that it could just be due to this chance. (b) If the effect were large, it could be of practical importance even though it wasn’t statistically significant; this is especially true if the sample was small.