More precisely, 'being from a background where you can get a higher level of education and then actually getting that education' is a sound strategy for improving your employment prospects.
Seeing this chart broken out by, say, parental income and assets would be interesting.
I'm not trying to make the absurd point that education is useless/bad, just that this is heavily conflated with all sorts of age/race/class confounding factors. The factors that might lead to outcomes like "less that a high school diploma" or "_some_ college" include things that won't be great for employment either - chaotic home life, illness or disability, requirement to care for illness/disability, being a participant or a victim in crime, drugs or alcohol abuse - or having parents that are affected by these factors.
Not wanting to be too snarky here, but a lot of posts (not yours, specifically) on inequality and social problems here on HN take on a unpleasant tone of undergraduate geek self-congratulation - "how _smart_ I am to be getting a degree with teh computers, if only all those poor people were as hard-working and clever as I am".
It never ceases to amaze me how even decades after MLK and the end of apartheid in America, that people still continually try to reframe these discussions into
"because they're browner than me they deserve to be poorer than me"
Now, I now that isn't what the OP probably intended, but (like sexism) the racism bias still runs deep in that land and is subtle and insidious.
Seeing this chart broken out by, say, parental income and assets would be interesting.
I'm not trying to make the absurd point that education is useless/bad, just that this is heavily conflated with all sorts of age/race/class confounding factors. The factors that might lead to outcomes like "less that a high school diploma" or "_some_ college" include things that won't be great for employment either - chaotic home life, illness or disability, requirement to care for illness/disability, being a participant or a victim in crime, drugs or alcohol abuse - or having parents that are affected by these factors.
Not wanting to be too snarky here, but a lot of posts (not yours, specifically) on inequality and social problems here on HN take on a unpleasant tone of undergraduate geek self-congratulation - "how _smart_ I am to be getting a degree with teh computers, if only all those poor people were as hard-working and clever as I am".