A new paper delivers the non-shocking news that rich kids have a way better chance of being admitted to super-elite universities than merely affluent kids even if their test scores are the same. This is due to a combination of legacy admissions, athlete preferences, and non-academic credentials, which provide elite universities with all the wiggle room they need to favor the rich:
At super-elite universities, rich kids have double the attendance rate of the merely affluent. At selective colleges in general, rich kids have about 50% higher attendance rates. At public universities, they have no advantage at all.
To my surprise, the paper also shows that this makes a significant difference:
Using an index of positive outcomes (prestigious work, grad school, high income), the paper shows that kids who get into super-elite universities (green bars) do a lot better than they would have at prominent public schools like Berkeley and Northwestern (yellow bars).
Finally, in an interesting aside, the authors show us who attends super-elite universities:
Top of the list are Supreme Court justices, who are overwhelmingly graduates of elite universities. Next up are US senators and elite journalists.
Who's not on the list are rich people in general and Fortune 500 CEOs in particular. Here's where the top 20 CEOs went to school. Jeff Bezos is the only one who attended an Ivy League university.
The moral of the story is that if you want to be rich, attend any college you want. But if you want to be elite, then (a) be born to rich parents and (b) attend an elite university.
Kevin, using the term "attendance" when you mean "enrollment" is a rookie mistake. Attendance is showing up for classes. Enrollment is being on the rolls for those classes. There's a distinction between enrollment and acceptance, too, which is worth being clear about.
This isn't nit-picking, IMHO. If you're going to write about education research you should know the terminology well enough to use it properly.
No one was confused about this.
The paper itself uses attendance for the fraction of people from a category of people who enroll in college. At first I did think Kevin was talking about attendance in classes, which would be nonsense on the numbers.
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The whole Google/Alphabet, including Larry Page and Sergei Brin, came out of Stanford, and the whole Facebook/Meta, including Zuckerberg, out of Harvard
Ummm....
Northwestern is a private school (albeit state chartered):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwestern_University
My quarterly tuition statements certainly suggested that it was a private university. Madison would have been a good deal cheaper.
Cardinal and white is so unflattering.
Came here to say the same thing. It’s similar to Kevin’s recent claim that USC is more difficult to get into then UCLA. Evidently, academia isn’t his area of expertise. Anyway, in the sentence in question, Michigan would probably be the proper companion to Berkeley.
I’m going to make a dumb comparison, World Of Warcraft(WoW) and education. I’m sure someone will point that out, or you’ll just ignore the post.
WoW is all about gear. Gear affects all kinds of things: damage you do, damage you take, how much you heal, how much health you have, etc. People always say something like, gear isn’t the problem (they’ll have gear) because it’s only like 5% difference. Sure, 5% more health, 5% harder hitting, 5% more healing, etc. When it’s all added up, for the record, it’s always way more than 5%, those 5%’s add up to more like a 20% advantage.
Barry Bonds, became the greatest hitter in history, because steroids gave him a small advantage that turned someone from a truly great hitter to the greatest hitter ever.
It’s the same thing here. All the little advantages add up. No cop harassment or an arrest gets a white kid a talking to, a black kid gets arrested. A rich father means he’s around someone who knows their way around that world. A poor kid gets none of that and walks into a place he never imagined. A donation to the school, which a poor kid can’t make gets one kid in, the other, not. And so on, and so forth.
In retrospect, I went in a different direction in the prior paragraph, but I’m gonna leave it.
Graduating from an elite school isn’t a guarantee of success, and people from lesser schools achieve success, it’s just not the way to bet.
I’m surprised to see a Banana Slug on that list.
"A rich father means he’s around someone who knows their way around that world. A poor kid gets none of that and walks into a place he never imagined."
During my sophomore year in high school, a friend said to me "Have you been prepping for the SAT?" and I replied "What the hell is the SAT?" Neither of my parents finished high school and they were unaware of it. Later, I learned that rich kids attend fancy summer boot camps to prep for the SAT.
Instead of obsessing over a limited number of slots at so-called elite universities, we should be baking a bigger pie by generously funding our public universities.
Striving to provide a quality education for all will do much more to achieve equality than giving the disadvantaged lottery tickets to attend the Ivy League.
That would help if better education was the actual advantage provided by Ivy League schools, but it isn't. The real advantage is networking: spending four years rubbing shoulders with the children of heads of state, CEO's, and billionaires.
An Ivy League grad leaves school not only with a prestigious name on their resume, but also with a Rolodex full of names who can offer real help in their careers.
YES!!!!! I was able to go to one of those public Universities for a bargain price back in the 1980s. My two siblings were as well. This is what we need to return to.
"... at prominent public schools like Berkeley and Northwestern (yellow bars)."
As a former Wildcat, I must protest: Northwestern is not a public school.
He probably confused it with NIU.
That's just not nice.
Re: "To my surprise, the paper also shows that this makes a significant difference"
Why are you surprised that being the child of a rich parent is correlated with a successful outcome? If you are on the top track, you are more likely to be admitted to a top track university, and you are more likely to do well after you graduate. Thems what haves gets.
The Ivies aren't really selling education; they're selling connections to power.
In that regard, the grandson of a Senator and son of a former Representative and the Ambassador to the United Nations (George W. Bush) or the son of a very wealthy New York real estate investor (Jared Kushner) are more valuable than a very intelligent farm kid who might end up accomplishing something significant but who might not.
The kids whose parents are already connected are a sure thing; the kids with a lot of potential but no significant connections are just a bet.
Bingo!
This is true (like Five Parrot’s networking comments above) but also works the other way.
I suspect the top universities want a diverse student body so the elite students they put out have a chance, perhaps the only one in their lives, to know a bit about different life experiences. If we’re stuck with elites running the show, that’s probably a good thing, beyond whatever good it does for the less-elites admitted under diversity criteria. .
Wait, so uber-wealthy people have huge advantages in society that ensure they always run the show?
All of human history called. It wants it's profound epiphany back. 😛
The chart showing where the top 20 CEOs went to school is misleading: Warren Buffet, for example, did actually go to the U of Nebraska - but then he went to Columbia Business School. Seems like a major detail to leave out, and now I'm wondering how many more of those CEOs have Ivy League pedigree that was just left out.
His father was also a congressman. Buffet is probably the most brilliant investor in history, but like many other hugely successful tycoons, he comes from a highly privileged background.
What I am going to say will be unpopular. Further, I admit I graduated from two, so called, elite universities (note, I was not from a wealthy family, I am not an athlete or a legacy).
In some countries (S Korea, France etc) there is a national test. Placement into elite universities are based primarily on test results.
In other countries (US and the UK) universities use test scores, grades and 'other factors' in determining acceptance.
- Would you like a testing only process? We see how complicated the distributional outcome for this is in elite public high school admissions (Thomas Jefferson, Stuyvesant, Lowell etc).
- Would you like to remove other factors? Socio economic, health challenges, remote areas etc?
- Do do you just want to selectively remove some other factors (sports you don't like sailing versus football, legacy admissions)?
Further, for those who want to remove legacy admissions, do you honestly believe it will have not impact on fund raising (yes, I know about MIT, Caltech and Johns Hopkins not having legacy admissions), placement (grads like to hire grads), or research? Clearly, most universities believe legacy admissions matter...
i’m not sure why you think your post is an example of brave, unpopular truths. I doubt the majority of readers of this blog would support a shift to test only admissions. The bottom line is universities maintain the admissions policies they do to serve their own interests, and not those of society as a whole. But this becomes problematic only, I would argue, if their interests conflict with the greater good. I would submit that, for the most part, they do not conflict: America’s elite universities are not a national problem, but an exceedingly valuable national treasure. This is not to say, of course, that the system of higher education in the United States doesn’t face some significant problems; It does. But those problems don’t have much to do with the fact that a select subset of US higher education institutions are extremely selective and well-resourced. Every rich country has some selective universities; ours are simply richer and more numerous.
Texas -- of all places -- actually does something right in this regard.
UT Austin automatically admits any Texas high school student who finishes in the top 6% of their graduating class. It doesn't matter if the student went to an expensive private school or a public school. A Texas student who finishes in the top 20% of their graduating class is guaranteed a spot somewhere in the UT system.
I think that policy is defensible, mind you, but I’m not sure it really is such a great example of getting it right. Surely there’s a significant variance in the rigor and competitiveness of Texas high schools. In essence, the policy amounts to a quota system that departs significantly from merit. It’s not hard to envision that, say, a student in the 92nd percentile at one of the state’s most demanding high schools ought to get the nod over a 95th percentile student at a weaker program.
This depends a lot on how one defines 'merit'.
The 95% student at a school in a poor neighborhood is not plainly less capable than the 95% student with wealthy parents who were able to enroll him or her at the "best" school in the state.
The paper doesn't seem to define how selective the "highly selective state flagship colleges" are in comparison to the super selective colleges. This could be very important when it comes to the measures of success based on super-elite achievements - there are only a few Supreme Court Justices, Presidents, Nobel Prize winners, etc. In principle, super-selective as opposed to highly selective could mean a critical difference in raw talent. Not that in the real world success isn't often based on getting plugged into the right network, such as the Ivies.
As I often say, most colleges will give an adequate education for most jobs. But to succeed at the very highest levels, for example in science, someone may need to be taught by real leaders in the field. It would be interesting to correlate success of students at the highest levels with the fraction of faculty who are regarded as real leaders, not just instructors.
But then there's the Lauren Boeberts and MTGs of the world and, well, obviously the whole meritocracy thing is completely broken in the US.
Just sayin.
I’m sure there’s some truth to this:
“The moral of the story is that if you want to be rich, attend any college you want. But if you want to be elite, then (a) be born to rich parents and (b) attend an elite university.”
But aren’t there some rather prominent exceptions that to come to mind?
For example: Joe Biden. He wasn’t born to rich parents. And his wiki page says he attended the University of Delaware and Syracuse University. As far as I can tell, he’s not exactly elite material, and yet he’s arguably a better president than some of his elite predecessors.
Heck, Donald Trump is more of an elite than Joe Biden; and, of course, maybe that’s one of the reasons that trump has trouble scoring (reality based) points against the current president.
Biden/Harris is the first President/VP team since Carter/Mondale where neither one attended an Ivy League school.
I've been rich and I've been poor, and
I'd rather be rich.
But I really, really, really don't want to be "elite".
Interesting, Google search gave (from the web):
Cornell, Harvard U., Columbia, Yale, U. of Pennsylvania, Princeton U, Dartmouth, Brown, William&Mary, MIT, Rice, Wellesley, Princeton NJ, Harvard College.
William&Mary along with Rutgers is a colonial college like most of the Ivies (Cornell is not), though not Ivies themselves. Wellesley is a sister school (if that still applies). MIT and Rice are not Ivies, but I guess is mentioned enough alongside Ivies to show up in the search. Not sure why the Princeton, the city, showed up, nor Harvard showing up as the university and the college.
The CEO thing is fascinating. Sure, some of them probably went on to get MBAs at elite schools, but they didn't get there based on their undergraduate school. I want to know more about how you go from an unremarkable college to a top CEO. Is it hard work, innate talent, good fortune? Most of these companies are long established, so they aren't generally entrepreneurs or founders.