The student bodies at America’s top colleges are overwhelmingly skewed toward children of the affluent.
Looking at the Ivy+ set of colleges — the eight Ivy League schools plus MIT, Chicago, Duke, and Stanford — a staggering 42% of the class is drawn from households in the top 5% of the income distribution. And though these schools account for just 0.8% of all American college students, they generated 11.6% of current CEOs, 26% of the staff of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and 71.4% of recent Supreme Court justices. This relatively narrow bottleneck for entry into the American elite is a powerful replicator of socioeconomic privilege. So when the Opportunity Insights project documented in a recent paper that students from the richest households are much more likely to be admitted to these schools than other students with similar test scores, it was a blockbuster finding even though it didn’t exactly surprise people.
This chart published in the New York Times based on the research, in particular, went extremely viral.