Question

You’ve been given a data set that contains information on educational attainment and criminal behavior. Along with the data set, you are told that crime and education have a (sample) covariance of - 3, that the variance of crime is 3, and that the variance of education is 12. With this information, compute the correlation between education and crime.

Answer 1

Lack of education leads to people not having valuable job skills, which leads to low pay, which leads to poverty for low skill workers. It’s hard to get a high paying job without some sort of education or job training. There is definitely a link between education levels and poverty levels, although there are exceptions and forces that drive trends in the opposite direction. For example, high education rates don’t mean much if there are few high paying jobs. Assuming there are high paying jobs for educated workers, or opportunities for educated people to start their own businesses, then more education usually means less poverty.

Crime is a bit more tricky to pin down, because multiple forces are at work in relations to crime rates, some of which are independent of poverty and education levels.

Most crime is committed by the poorest and the wealthiest people. The poor often do it to survive, or because they feel entitled to take from the “rich,” while the rich often commit crimes because they think they can get away with it. The extremely rich just manipulate government to change the law so what they want to do is legal.

Generally, crime would go down where poverty is reduced, because as people become more wealthy and start achieving middle class status, they have more to lose.

But there are other factors at play, such as culture and attitudes towards crime and the laws. If a specific social group in society thinks certain laws are unjust, they will tend to ignore such laws. For example, millions of people smoke marijuana even though it’s illegal in most places simply because they don’t care about the law. In this case, people’s attitudes towards the law will override the influences of poverty or education level.

So, poverty and education levels can and do influence crime rates, there are other influences as well. Education has more of a direct influence on poverty, although it can be countered with economic factors, like lack of jobs.