Children from America’s wealthiest families are more than twice as likely to attend an elite university as middle-class kids with the same grades, new research has revealed.
A paper from Opportunity Insights, a group of Harvard researchers and analysts, showed the advantages enjoyed by the top 1 percent of Americans with incomes of more than $611,000.
They studied the eight Ivy League institutions, as well as the University of Chicago, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Duke.
They used anonymized admissions data for hundreds of thousands of students, income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores from 1999 to 2015.
The data show that children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted to elite schools than the average applicant.
Meanwhile, at the country’s top public universities, rich kids don’t enjoy the same advantages, and were just as likely to get a spot as a poorer candidate with the same grades.
The study comes after the Supreme Court this month struck down race-based admissions, but colleges can still give preference to legacy students, athletes, and others.
‘The stark difference in admissions gradients by parental income between selective public and private institutions suggests that highly selective private colleges may have the capacity to change the composition of their student bodies,’ researchers said.
They could achieve this ‘by changing their admissions practices to emulate those used by highly selective public colleges,’ they added in their five-page report.
Rich kids had better chances of getting into elite schools because admissions tutors there favored legacy candidates, athletes and were guided by other nonacademic credentials.
Attending a top school helped set up graduates for life, the researchers found.
Graduates of elite schools had twice the chance of getting into a prestigious graduate school, triple the chance of joining an elite firm, and a 60 percent greater chance of becoming a top earner.
The 12 elite colleges account for more than a tenth of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of US Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and most Supreme Court justices, said the report.
The researchers said that a better admissions system at elite schools would trickle down to make the country fairer.
‘We conclude that even though they educate a small share of students overall and therefore cannot change rates of social mobility by themselves, Ivy-Plus colleges could meaningfully
