Draw Your Own

The New York Times column "The Upshot" has an interactive experiment of drawing your perceptions of how poverty affects college admissions. They provide the axes: x = poverty income percentile and y = percent of children who attended college. Your job is to select points to estimate what percentage of children attended college for each parents' income percentile, producing a line running, most predictably, from low college attendance for low income up to higher attendance for higher income. Along the way your line must pass through the point of 58% college attendance for the 50th percentile of income. Is your line straight, concave up, concave down, S-shaped, etc? Draw your guess, they say. The best part is that your guess is shown with a shaded aggregate of over 60,000 others, with darker color indicating greater frequency. It's a great image, but I won't be a spoiler for the game. Much like an image of a percentile regression. Try it out and see for yourself.