Median Family Household Incomes by School
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Anonymous
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I have a BCC kid. This is interesting data - no idea if it seems correct or not!
Feels like we have a wide distribution of incomes at the school, obviously with a heavy skew toward high income. |
Anonymous
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The order of schools might be what I more or less expected.
But I question the number of families and if it skews anythings. ie for Poolesville it's only 2345 families? That MIGHT be possible considered it's more of a rural area. But Magruder, Clarksburg, Blake, etc all seem to have smaller than expected number of families. This is all based off of self report Census data right? So data might be missing for families that didn't respond? Or am I not understanding it correctly? |
Anonymous
Dcum has a very skewed sense of what people make. 256k is a very high median income. It is high in absolute terms as well as relative to other parts of the county. |
Anonymous
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As a sanity check, look at the 20817 zip code around Whitman:
https://censusreporter.org/profiles/86000US20817-20817/ That gives a $240,104 median income level, with 58% above $200k. Zip code areas don't have their data capped at $200k like block groups, so it should be accurate. That's all households, not just families. My all-household estimate (I didn't post it) was $230,633 with 56.1% over $200k. The zip code and school boundaries don't match, but they overlap a fair bit. And the income numbers end up looking pretty similar. |
Anonymous
So, some of the family household numbers looked funny to me, too, but that's one of the more straight-forward things to compute. Poolesville was particularly surprising. That area has a population of around 8500, estimating off the zip code populations. I get 2980 households and 2345 families. That seems low. The average household size is about 2.7. 2.7 * 2980 = 8046 people. Not terribly far off. The rural areas might have a slightly higher average household size. |
Anonymous
| At what theses are you driving to support with this analysis? |
Anonymous
| Why would Northwood have a higher median income than Wheaton or Blair? I’m not sure the Northwood numbers are correct |
Anonymous
No thesis. But I was playing around with ACS data on a different project, and I realized I could do this fairly easily. Though, I initially didn't realize I was going to run into the problem with top income bucket being limited to $200k. |
Anonymous
Not sure about Wheaton, but Blair's attendance zone has a lot more multi-family housing than Northwood's. |
Anonymous
| It does suggest that two GS-13s living together are a significant share of Whitman. At the very least that should disabuse people of its level of wealth. |
Anonymous
| Those seem way too high, especially for the schools lower down on the list. |
Anonymous
Catchment, not attendees -- those attending the more rigorous programs at those schools from outside the catchment, for whom the family incomes likely are higher, would be counted with their home school rather than the attended school. There are a lot of lower-cost (for MoCo) housing units in the Wheaton & Blair catchments. Some in Northwood's, but there is a lower percentage of multi-family. The boundary study data is handled the same way. |
Anonymous
| I know we don’t have this data but it would be interesting to see median incomes of those actually attending the public schools (versus private). I would imagine that the higher the income the more likely the family is to send kids to private. That would have a tendency to make the incomes of students attending the schools more alike. |
Anonymous
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Op here. I did this in part because every time wealth inequality comes up it is hard to compare schools to each other. FARMS just gives you the low end, not any indication of the high end. Looking at other data sources and proxies is problematic. Data sources often aren't closely tied to school boundaries, and it is hard to demonstrate you're not cherry picking data.
I double checked the logic and did some consistency checks with zip codes. The data seems to be accurate. But this isn't the median income for families of students- it includes young married couples and married retirees. Even for families with kids, it includes single-parent households and single-earner households. These will drive the median lower than whatever you might intuitively expect. And in some cases, people underestimate how many multi-family homes are in an area- you don't need a lot of space to offset expensive SFHs. |
Anonymous
How much exactly do you think a retiree needs for property taxes, health insurance, and utilities? $200k?! |