How Race Affects Educational Attainment

Contrary to mainstream belief, statistics show that being black or Hispanic in America increases an individual's expected years of schooling as soon as you control for one variable.  Any guesses on what that variable may be: parents' income, parents' educational attainment, urban school district, family owning a home, gender?  The correlations between years of educational attainment and being black or Hispanic are still negative after adjusting for something that is seemingly as important as family household income.  The answer: achievement test score.

For students who performed equally well on an achievement test given to a sample of 3796 high school seniors, being black or Hispanic will add a little more than .3 years of schooling.  (For those of you who care, this result is statistically significant at the 1% level using a 2-sided t-test.)  If you ignore controlling this variable, being Hispanic subtracts .2 years and being black subtracts .5 years of schooling.  In addition, a regression on students who performed above the 96th percentile shows that race no longer becomes a (statistically) significant factor and expected years of schooling increases to 15.5 years.

Controlling for end-of-high-school academic achievement being the primary corrector the mainstream bias about race and education may not be a surprise for some, myself included.  The more interesting phenomenon is the positive correlation between race and schooling after controlling for achievement.  I don't have any good idea why this is the case.  Feel free to share any hypotheses you may have.

Note: I used STATA to run regressions on this data set supplied by Professor Cecilia Rouse of Princeton University.

6 Easy Ways to Get People to Like You Immediately

Here are some techniques that I've learned and implemented to become more social.  I understand that
"easy" is relative but these should not be too difficult (or at least the learning curve is not steep).

1. Smile- More specifically, use a Duchenne smile!  This probably the simplest one but some people just don't know or care about it's effectiveness.

2. Never say "no"- Eliminate the word "no" from your daily speech and see what happens.  This will help you to avoid putting others down.

3. Focus on the person to whom you are talking- Focus the initial dialogue on the other person and listen carefully to what he/she has to say.  People love talking about themselves and their interests and having someone who will listen to them.

4. Remember people's names- A person's name is the sweetest sound to that person's ears.  Make a conscious effort to remember people's names as soon as you meet them.

5. Make eye contact- I frequently struggle with this one but eye contact is crucial.  You will appear more confident, trustworthy, and even attractive.  Next time you talk to new people, find out their eye colors within the first few seconds.  You can just focus on one eye as you converse with them.

6. Match their energy levels- If a group of people are lively and you come in with very low energy, they're not going to accept you in a welcoming way.  That said, if you notice someone is in a mood to relax, you might want to think twice before interacting with him/her to get pumped up for the next UFC event.  Some recommend mirroring the other's body language but I believe this will naturally happen if you two are on the same level and communicating well.

These are probably the simplest ones most people can use instantly.  More advice is covered in Dale Carnegie's classic How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Some tips are a bit more difficult for many folks (e.g. apologizing immediately, not criticizing others, applying social psychological techniques to persuade people).  I hope this helped :)