Are AFOLs more educated?

[AmperZand]

This thread http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=84191#entry1637106

got me thinking about AFOLdom and education. Are AFOLs more educated (formal number of years in education or highest qualification held) than non-FOL adults?

I suspect that they are but that's just conjecture on my part. Does anyone have any empirical evidence? Do you have suspicions one way or the other?

I'm guessing that because LEGO is putatively a kid's toy, non-FOL adults think AFOLs are educationally sub-normal, but that the reality is just the opposite, i.e. we're educationally above average.

What do you think?

Hope I'm posting this in the right forum. Apologies if not.

[Scorpiox]

I'm going to say the obvious thing here: it's impossible to label intelligence, education or whatever to a single hobby or interest. If you want to carry out a survey and measure this yourself - then by all means, go ahead. I almost guarantee that you won't find any strong correlation between collecting LEGO and being well-educated. Is this not pretty much the same as suggesting that men who play video games are lazy, uninspired failures?

[Andy D]

I am a nerd. There I've said it. From what I read here on EB many folks seem kind of nerdy (I say that in the most kind and respectful way). From my observations nerdy people tend to be more educated... Therefore you can imply that many AFOL's tend to be more educated.

Andy D

[Kristel]

Didn't one of the more recent TLG quarterly surveys ask us about our level of education? Maybe you can check those results, although I don't know if there are any biases in who chooses to answer those quarterly surveys.

I'm curious why it matters.

[pbat]

Are AFOLs more educated than non-FOL adults?

I suspect that they are but that's just conjecture on my part. Does anyone have any empirical evidence? Do you have suspicions one way or the other?

What do you think?

Isn't it enough that we feel superior? Do we really need empirical evidence to be elite?

Maybe it's all easy: AFOLs most likely used LEGO as a kid as well. LEGO is rather expensive. Kids whose parents are financially better off are more likely getting more LEGO than kids with poor parents. Poor people are less likely to get a higher education as well; I guess one's (formal) education correlates to a great deal with his parents' wealth. So LEGO, education and wealth depend on each other. But I do not want to judge who is chicken and who is egg: Using LEGO helps boosting your spatial senses, thus allowing more success in the STEM fields, thus getting a higher education, thus getting rich yourself and thus getting even more LEGO and becoming an AFOL.

[TomLego]

I have a doctorate degree. I did not have Legos when I was a child. Having sat through a three year doctoral program at a major American university, I can assure you that just because you are in the program doesn't mean than you are more educated than the average man on the street. Maybe I spent more time in a classroom, but I'm no more educated than my well traveled brother with his wealth of life experiences.

Edited July 5, 2013 by TomLego

[pinioncorp]

One thing we need to remember: Lego is an expensive hobby. Expensive hobbies need a well paying job to support it, and only an educated people can hold a well paying job (and why I don't have any Lego ).

Are AFOLs more educated than everyone else? Possibly. But it depends greatly on what you define as a comparison.

[Kivi]

I almost guarantee that you won't find any strong correlation between collecting LEGO and being well-educated.

I agree. If I just think of the AFOLs I know there's quite a broad spectrum of level of formal education.

Maybe one aspect of this hypothesis would be that playing (or creating) with lego stimulates and develops certain abilities such as logical thinking, combinatorics, 3D and spatial perception, basic principles of physics etc. so the children playing with lego and developing these skills might be better at learning new things and thus gaining better education in the end in this way.

[Pablo94]

In Poland we've just got resaults of ours maturity exam. I have to say, after w shared it on our local forum it seems, that we are well educated. The avarage score in math and physics (advanced level) was something about 80-85%

[AmperZand]

@Kristel, It doesn't really matter except perhaps to TLG and its competitors. I'm just curious about communities based on niche leisure interests.

@TomLego, I can't comment about you and your brother. What I can say - and this is backed up by a huge amount of scholarly research - is that formal education is related to a range of sociological and psychological variables, e.g. mortality and happiness. So it's not a meaningless category. What's more, there's mounting evidence that its relationship to other variables is causal.

[Luke_likes_Lego]

Duhhh......emperi-what ?

;-)

[Legogal]

Not sure about the formal education question and its relation to LEGO ownership. None of my "formally educated" friends are into LEGO. A big ZERO.

But it does seem to me that AFOLs tend to be creative and spatially oriented. Curious and fun loving. Not snobby in that they recognize equally anyone who can build a decent MOC. Open to sharing what they know...even with complete strangers. Not hung up on appearances...have you seen what they usually wear!!! In summary, my kind of folks!

[bacem]

i don't think there is any direct relation between being well-educated and being AFOL. i know many AFOL who didn't have high educational background.

[N-4K0]

I have a high school education, and I'm an AFOL

[Bonaparte]

Interesting question...

I know that a lot of the people coming to the Eurobricks event have had an above average education and can spent crazy amount of money on LEGO. For example, ~12% were specialized doctors, many IT specialists (programmers, etc.), some engineers (myself being one), ... .

But maybe the people traveling half way across Europe (or even the world) to come to our events are not the average AFOL!

I think that against the world average education level the answer is for sure yes. If you only look at the population where LEGO is selling most (Europe, US, ...) I'm not so sure.

As this is LEGO related I'll move this discussion to our LEGO General Discussion and News forum.

[Sebeus I]

I tend to believe the AFOL community is very divers but I do think pbat's comment makes a lot of sense.

[Capt.JohnPaul]

I think it's possible. For example, all over EB, I'm reading so-and-so has a degree in engineering or physics or something. I don't think people (all) who like LEGO are smart, but smart people like LEGO.

[davee123]

I would have to expect that LEGO fans probably have a higher degree of education, although I expect that's correlation, not causation.

Generally speaking, AFOLs were fans of LEGO as children. And generally, LEGO is a popular toy in more affluent areas around the globe, like the USA, UK, Germany, etc. And even then, LEGO is viewed as an expensive toy, and is often purchased by families that have more money to spare. And (in turn) those families are more likely to encourage or even provide for a higher level of education.

It would be sort of like suggesting that kids that were given brand new sports cars for their 16th birthdays are more educated-- it's PROBABLY true, by virtue of the fact that your parents are probably wealthy, and therefore, probably also paid for your college tuition.

So I would expect that, yes, that's probably statistically accurate, although not necessarily something that means what you might THINK it means.

DaveE

[Spitfire2865]

Maybe its because Lego is a building toy. And because of that, requires more mental thinking and problem solving, which we would learn from. Because of that, we could strive for careers that also contain a lot of thinking and problem solving. Also maybe the building thing is why many are engineers as one of you above me said.

[Gryphon Ink]

Dropouts and hooligans over in this corner, yo!

[Grimmbeard]

I see what some of you are saying with the "richer families can provide better education", and I generally agree with that, and it makes sense. However, LEGO is world-wide known, and I'm pretty sure any person you asked would know about it. Therefore, assuming an AFOL is defined as any adult that likes LEGO, I would say that no, they are not always well educated. I'd say that we have the same variety in education as any group in society.

[robuko]

The link between education and wealth is different in different countries, and the ratio of Lego price/modal disposable income varies hugely across the world. It will be very difficult to make any sense of the answers on a global basis. I have an MA degree and a reasonable income and I like Lego, but I did not have a lot of Lego as a child as my parents did not have much money. My AFOL friends are probably less well educated than my non-AFOL friends I guess. But so what...

[ISDAvenger]

I was homeschooled from 1st to 10th grade, and spent the last two years in the public high school system. It was a culture shock. Our local school board did not give my sister and I credit for our home school educationa and I was forced to get a GED. I am currently pursuing an online Bachelors degree, but nothing in rocket science. I am not the smartest person alive, nor the dumbest. I got asked at a Lego convention if I was an engineer, and I was like, "Uh....no." I think a lot of it is based on talent, passion, and experiance, versus education.

[eurotrash]

I'm going to comment in my capacity as a professional number geek (my Linked-In Job description has me as a 'Maths Ninja' and I spend most of my week building probability models in Excel).

So, the premise is that there's a correlation between degree of Lego AFOLness to Years of Education received?

How are you going to measure AFOLness? Is it a binary? (Yes/No), is it a scale? (1-10, and if so, what's that going to be based on)?, is it based on eurobrick postings (because if that's the case Lightning Tiger is going to skew the results one way or another).

Let's assume that you could define the bases above and grab some data. Then there's the problem of sample size. I'm guessing AFOLs are a very, very, very, very small subset of Adults. Any Education Level/AFOL-ness relationship that could be observable is likely to be swamped by such a disproportionately small sample and could be dismissible as noise (ideally you want sample sizes of AFOLness and non-AFOLness data points that are comparable, or at least in the same order of magnitude).

Either way whether there's a link or not the one thing that you have to remember when looking at a field of Probability results is that Correlation is not Causation.

[vmln8r]

Plausibly, yes, but who cares?