[lsc]

I thought I read that the correlation between your income and your parent's income was stronger than the correlation between your education and your income. I can't find a reference, though, so it's possible I'm making it up.

here we go:

http://mmss.wcas.northwestern.edu/thesis/articles/get/776/

"I find that family income remains an important positive predictor of eventual adult outcomes. The effects persist even when many characteristics that are related to income, such as parents’ education, home environment characteristics, parental involvement, school characteristics and student ability, are controlled in a regression framework. "

...

"Even conditional on a host of other characteristics such as grades, test scores, and parents’ education and level of involvement, a student from a family earning $50,000 a year can still expect to earn about 10% less in the future than an otherwise identical student from a family earning $150,000 a year. These relationships are all statistically significant at the 1% level."