Getting better math scores will pay off with more money later in life.
At least that appears to be the conclusion of a 2024 study from the Urban Institute, as reported by The 74, “a nonprofit news organization covering America’s education system from early childhood through college and career”.
According to their writer, the research found a correlation between “math skills” and a person’s earnings as an adult. But she (or her editor) then, in the subhead, leaps to the conclusion that the results “underscores the need for better math instruction starting in the early grades”.
When it comes to factors that affect a student’s well-being in adulthood, better math skills might not be the first thing that comes to mind. But as it turns out, increasing math scores helps deliver stronger long-term returns for students — especially related to earnings — than improvements in reading scores and factors involving health.
So, better math scores correlate with higher earnings as an adult, according to this study. What about other areas of study?
The same cannot be said for the earnings impact of improving reading scores, which actually diminishes as students get older, falling from 0.9 percent (about $300) to 0.5 percent (less than $200) from ages 5 to 11. Meanwhile, the impact of health and social relationships are consistent but modest as children get older. “It’s not an enormous impact, but it’s an impact,” Acs says. “Would you pass up a 3 percent raise?”
The analysis bolsters previous research touting a correlation between math and earnings later in life and gives policymakers much to think over as they choose among interventions aimed at benefiting children in the short or long term, as well as when might be the most effective moment to unleash those targeted interventions.
So much to question in that complex mess, but let’s begin with a fundamental concept from statistics: correlation does not imply causation.
When presented with the results of a study, far too many people either forget that concept, ignore it, or never learned it in the first place.
Just because a piece of research shows a connection between two factors does not mean that one actually caused the other to happen. That’s especially true when studying human behavior where the number of variables are impossible to control for.
Then there’s that term “math skills”.
The researchers, of course, measured those “skills” using standardized tests. Exam programs based almost entirely on a college-dictated, heavily-academic path that points directly at Calculus. Math that the vast majority of students will never use as an adult.1
Standardized tests, especially the SAT and AP exams, are more a measure of how well students have learned to play the academic game. Is it possible that those game-playing skills are the ones being reflected in their higher earnings later in life? Rather than the math they learned – and then likely forgot soon after the test?
Can we also draw conclusions from the other bits in their findings? Obviously, we need to increase student time in math classes but does that mean less time engaging with reading since it doesn’t have as big of an “earnings impact”?
And since improving student health and social relationships only resulted in a small increase in earnings as an adult, we can just ignore that piece, right? Which is just as well since none of that stuff is on the test.
Finally, the author of this piece, as most educational researchers, ignores the fact that monetary income is only one part of living a happy and productive life. That “well being in adulthood” from the opening paragraph.
Maybe school should be about things other than increasing the lifetime balance sheet.
Instead, K12, and especially high school, should be focused on allowing kids to explore their interests and talents, over a wide variety of subjects. Helping them understand the world and the options they have to make their way in it after graduation.
What they used to call getting a “liberal arts” education when I was in school. Although that term is probably too much of a trigger for the snowflakes in the vocab police these days.
The photo, part of a mural in the Department of the Interior building in DC, shows people in the past century making a living without AI. I assume the world still needs welders.
1. I’ve ranted many times in this space about the over-emphasis on math in K12 and about how that curriculum is largely divorced from the kind of math used in the real world. No need to expand on that aspect here.