What the new Ivy+ admissions paper really shows

Matthew Yglasias

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.


Fast Lane Literacy by sedso