July 24, 2007
Well duh
Some genius has released a study that shows that obese girls are less likely to go to college than non-obese ones.
This seems to be anecdotally true. Having now attended three institutions of higher learning, and there were very few obese people there. Most looked pretty healthy.
The reasons for this should be blindingly obvious. Obesity is linked to socio-economic status, specifically that it's downwardly mobile. College is linked to socio-economic status, specifically that it's upwardly mobile. Ergo, the worse your BMI on the heavy end, the less likely you are to go to college.
There was one finding that didn't fall directly into the above observation. Obese girls who attended secondary schools in which obesity was uncommon were much less likely to attend college, buy boys showed no difference from their peers in similar school settings. But without seeing the data it's impossible to know just how significant it is. Either way, I think the conclusions drawn by the researchers are a bit premature.
I hereby posit Davidson's Rule of Sociological Assumption: Don't assume you've discovered a problem with society when the problem is largely explicable by money or the lack thereof.
