How to Lie with Education Statistics, Part 1

WalletHub's "Most and Least Educated Cities in America" makes claims about the link between their educational attainment score and household income, but those claims are going to score a D-

Photo by Deng Xiang on Unsplash

At the end of June, WalletHub released its list of the most- and least-educates cities in America. Since educational attainment generally leads to increased wages, it stands to reason that areas with higher educational attainment will generally have better-paid citizens, and thus a higher tax base. Higher tax bases, of course, mean more money can be devoted to public goods, such as education.

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So when WalletHub presented a pretty graph that appeared to show a significant disconnect for some cities between their educational ranking and household income. Apparently, several metro areas fell outside of the predicted relationship.

Unfortunately, because of how WalletHub chose to present their data, it appeared that certain metro areas fell outside the predicted standard, when in fact, it was all about their data display choices and how they chose to report their measurements.