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The admissions policies at a handful of highly selective private colleges help to perpetuate privilege across generations.
That’s one conclusion of a working paper circulated Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study found that students who come from households in the top 1% of the earnings distribution are more than twice as likely to attend a certain subset of elite colleges, known as Ivy Plus institutions, than those from middle-class families with similar standardized test scores.
The authors are economists from Harvard University and Brown University who are affiliated with Opportunity Insights, an organization focused on research related to economic mobility.
“‘The Ivy League is reinforcing inequality in our society by driving more and more wealthy people into positions of power, and only further exacerbating the wealth inequality at play in our society.’”
That admissions advantage has implications for students beyond the four years they’re in school, the study found. Students who attend these so-called Ivy Plus colleges, which include the Ivy League institutions as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, Stanford University and Duke University, are more likely to end up in the 1%, attend an elite graduate school and work for a prestigious employer than students who attend the average highly selective public college.
“This proves the point that the Ivy League is reinforcing inequality in our society by driving more and more wealthy people into positions of power, and only further exacerbating the wealth inequality at play in our society,” said Bryce McKibben, the senior director of policy and advocacy at Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice.
The findings come less than a month after the Supreme Court banned colleges from using race-conscious policies in admissions. Leading up to and following the decision, higher-education stakeholders have worried about how colleges could maintain diverse classes and their status as engines of economic and social mobility without affirmative action.
What the new working paper suggests: Eliminating admissions advantages for well-off students could go a long way in that effort, at least at these schools.
By axing admissions nudges for wealthy students, the leadership at the 12 colleges that are the focus of the study has the potential to at least partially reshape who reaches top positions of leadership in society, said study co-author John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown University.
“This is a very, very high-impact set of decisions that just 12 people could make,” he said. “It’s pretty rare that you have something that such a small handful of institutions could do that could make this much difference, even if that difference isn’t all that we need.”
Legacy applicants and athletes have a big advantage
Applicants from households in the top 1% of the earnings distribution, or whose families make at least $611,000, are 55% more likely to get into Ivy Plus schools than those from middle-class families with similar SAT or ACT scores, the study found. For the purposes of the paper, the researchers defined middle class as the middle of the income distribution for applicants to highly selective schools; these families earn between $83,000 and $116,000 and are between the 70th and 80th percentile in income nationally.
“Students from more modest backgrounds are in the application pool already; it’s just that they’re not benefiting” from the admissions advantages the paper shows wealthier students receive, Friedman said.
Elite colleges’ focus on recruiting athletes explains about a quarter of the admissions bump applicants from the top 1% receive, the study found. Recruited athletes at these colleges tend to skew higher income.
Another 30% of the admissions advantage for wealthy students comes from admissions officers viewing students from this group as having stronger non-academic components of their applications, like extracurricular activities, according to the study. That dynamic has a lot to do with what high school students attend.
Admissions offices tend to give similar academic ratings to students who graduate from public high schools in affluent neighborhoods as those who attend non-religious high schools with similar standardized test scores, the study found. But students who attend these private schools have higher non-academic ratings. Students from households in the top 1% are more likely to attend these schools.
Finally, about 46% of the admissions bump for wealthy students comes from policies at universities that favor applicants with parents who attended a given college. These legacy preferences have come under scrutiny in recent years — a process that has accelerated in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action.
“‘It’s easier for these things to change in a moment where there’s a lot of fluidity than if this just came out of the blue.’”
Colleges including Wesleyan University and Carnegie Mellon University recently announced they would drop their legacy policies, and a group of organizations filed a civil-rights complaint against Harvard last month over its legacy-admissions policy.
This period, which has schools reimagining their approach to admissions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ruling, may allow the study’s findings to resonate more with college leaders, Friedman said.
“It’s easier for these things to change in a moment where there’s a lot of fluidity than if this just came out of the blue,” he said.
Indeed, at Harvard University, officials are in the midst of reviewing aspects of the school’s admissions practices following the court’s decision, Nicole Rura, a spokesperson for the school, said in an email. A lawsuit against Harvard over race-conscious admissions policies was one of the two that made it to the Supreme Court.
The paper’s findings “will add insights to our considerations and our continuing efforts to attract and support a community of outstanding students whose educational opportunities are not constrained by financial circumstances,” Rura said.
Elite schools’ alumni are overrepresented in the halls of power
For individual students, getting into one of these Ivy Plus colleges can mean access to professors at the top of their fields and other resources. But the thumb on the scale that wealthy students receive in the admissions process at these schools has implications for society more broadly, the authors note.
“This is really an engine of inequality,” McKibben said. When a wealthy student gets into a prestigious college, the data indicates, “it’s not just a final stepping stone” for the reproduction of privilege, he added.
Though less than one half of 1% of Americans attend one of these colleges, their alumni have an outsized influence. More than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs attended one of the schools, as did a quarter of the U.S. Senate, the paper notes. Students who attend one of these colleges are roughly 60% more likely to reach the top 1% by the time they’re 33; they’re also three times as likely to work at a prestigious employer and nearly twice as likely to attend an elite graduate school, the study found.
Accessing those plum outcomes has little to do with the characteristics that gave the applicants advantages in the admissions process, the researchers found. Instead, students’ academic performance in high school and standardized test scores are much more predictive of post-college success, they note.
How to level the playing field
The study’s findings and other experts point to changes that could make these institutions, and the higher-education system more broadly, a better engine of economic mobility. Those proposals include:
Getting rid of policies favoring wealthy applicants: The researchers found that if these Ivy Plus institutions stopped giving an advantage to recruited athletes, legacy applicants and students with higher non-academic ratings, the share of students from the bottom 95% of the income distribution that attends these schools would go up.
Eliminating these policies would increase the number of students from families earning $240,000 or less by about 144 students at the typical Ivy Plus school, the study found.
Among the Ivy Plus schools that were the focus of the research, MIT stood out in that wealthy students were no more likely to attend the school than less-wealthy students with similar test scores. MIT hasn’t given weight to legacy status for years.
Emulating the admissions approach of selective public colleges: The researchers found that at flagship public colleges, students from the top 1% don’t have an admissions advantage. These colleges evaluate students in a more standardized way, allowing less room for subjective criteria that could benefit wealthy students to tip the scale, the researchers note.
“Fundamentally, when we think of our best-resourced public universities, they are still acting in different ways than these Ivy Plus institutions,” said Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University.
That tendency to focus less on criteria that could give an advantage to wealthier students may in part be motivated by the notion that public institutions feel “they have at least some mission to serve the public interest,” McKibben said.
Still, wealthier students are overrepresented at public flagship colleges. That’s in large part because these students are more likely to apply to these schools, the paper found. Boosting efforts to recruit low-income students could help increase their ranks on these schools’ campuses, the study notes.
Recognizing financial aid isn’t enough: Elite colleges often tout their generous financial-aid policies, which typically allow students from low-income families to attend their schools for free, and in some cases allow students from middle-class families to avoid taking on debt for tuition.
But these policies don’t do much to boost the ranks of middle-class students, the researchers note. The share of students at highly selective schools coming from the wealthiest families as compared to the share of middle-class students hasn’t changed in 20 years, the study found.
“These results underscore the importance of coupling financial support (which may be a necessary condition for lower-income students to attend expensive colleges) with other policy changes to increase economic mobility,” the researchers wrote.
Directing more resources to other types of colleges: Focusing on changing highly selective private colleges isn’t enough to improve economic mobility writ large, the researchers cautioned at the end of their paper.
That’s in part because students experience the impacts of inequality throughout their lives that could be better addressed through interventions in the K-12 school system and other areas. In addition, because these schools educate such a small portion of Americans, focusing on them exclusively isn’t enough to ensure higher education is a tool of economic mobility, they wrote.
“These Ivy Plus institutions — they are making a choice, and I don’t know why we have to go along with that choice,” Baker said. “When I think about us moving forward, I’m trying to think about what we do to shift power and resources to the institutions that actually educate the majority of people in our country.”
