College Applicants From Ultra-Wealthy Families Much More Likely to Land at a Top School

The children of the top 1% wealthiest American families are more likely to attend an Ivy League or equally elite college, a leg up that stifles diversity in leadership positions when graduates join the workforce, three economists say in a new academic study.

So-called Ivy Plus schools — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Columbia and Cornell, plus Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago — are more than twice as likely to admit a student from a high-income family as from a low- or middle-income one, even when that poorer student has comparable SAT or ACT scores, Opportunity Insights found in a study published this month. The organization, based at Harvard, is a research and policy institute focused on improving economic opportunity. 

Attending an elite school triples a student’s chances of getting hired by a prestigious company, the study found. It also boosts by 60% a student’s chances of earning enough money to be in the top 1% of earners making more than $611,000. The study was written by Harvard economists Raj Chetty and David J. Deming and Brown economist John N. Friedman; all three are part of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the nation’s leading academic think tank.

By offering new data on the outsized role that elite educational institutions play in shaping American society and corporate life, the study is a counterpoint to recent shifts by many top schools that say they’re trying to admit more applicants from modest backgrounds.

Of the 1,500 students Princeton enrolled this year for the class of 2026, 17% are the first in their families to go to college; 61% qualify for financial aid and 21% are eligible for need-based Federal Pell Grants. This year, for the second consecutive year, Harvard expanded its financial aid policy for low- and middle-income families, making college free for families with annual incomes below $85,000. Yale similarly promises that families earning less than $75,000 are not expected to contribute to the cost of their child’s education.

Still, the study suggests that the need-blind admissions policy of all seven Ivy League schools for U.S. students may in some cases still reinforce a preference for wealthier candidates.

On Monday, the Department of Education said it was opening an investigation into a lawsuit filed earlier this month by three community groups against Harvard that alleges the university discriminates against students of color and favors white children of alumni.

A regional director of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights wrote to one of the lawyers representing the groups that “OCR is opening the following issue for investigation: Whether the University discriminates on the basis of race by using donor and legacy preferences in its undergraduate admissions process in violation of Title VI and its implementing regulations.”

The research identified three factors driving what it called the “high income admissions advantage at private colleges” —preferences for legacy candidates, weight placed on non-academic credentials and recruitment of athletes.

These factors tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools with affluent student bodies and for students coming from wealthier backgrounds generally. Some competitive high school sports, such as rowing and gymnastics, are expensive; meanwhile, a student who needs to work part-time after school to help support their family doesn’t have time to participate in resume-boosting extracurricular activities like robotics and piano lessons.

What’s more, legacy applicants — generally meaning students with a parent or grandparent who graduated from the school they’re applying to — from the top 1% highest-earning families are five times more likely to be admitted to Ivy-Plus colleges than students with comparable credentials. But those tailwinds don’t carry over to students who apply to another, equally elite college. When applying to other Ivy-Plus schools and flagship public colleges, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage.

The analysis used federal records of college attendance and parental income taxes for nearly all college students from 1999 to 2015, and standardized test scores between 2001 and 2015. In 2017, the research institute found that across 38 colleges, including five in the Ivy League (Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown), more students came from the top 1% family incomes than from the bottom 60%. The latest study comes nearly one month after the Supreme Court voted in a landmark case to end affirmative action.

Earlier this month, a Princeton sociology professor penned an op-ed for The New York Times in which he argued that ending legacy admissions wouldn’t improve socio-economic diversity. Legacy students, Shamus Khan wrote, are “far more likely to be replaced by other kinds of privileged students than by underprivileged ones.

Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Connecticut, on July 20 became the latest school to end legacy admissions. MIT, Johns Hopkins, Amherst and the University of California system, among others, have already done so.