Who rises to leadership in the U.S.? It should come as no surprise that U.S. senators, Supreme Court justices, Rhodes Scholars, hires of top law and finance firms all disproportionately graduate from the "Ivy Plus" colleges: The Ivy League schools plus MIT, Duke, the University of Chicago, and Stanford.
And disproportionately, these elite schools admit students from high-income families over those from middle and lower-income families with the same SAT/ACT scores.
As Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, John N. Friedman found in their recent study, legacy admissions, the weight given to non-academic factors in admissions decisions, and preferential admissions for athletes all contribute to higher admission rates for the elite. None of those three factors predict post-college success.
A summary of their research can be found here:
Following publication of the study, the New York times developed an interactive tool for comparing the percentage of students admitted from top and bottom income families for 139 top colleges and the disparities are striking.
Additional resources (the full paper, presentation slides, links to press coverage) for making sense of the admissions disparities can be found at the project website.
As Chetty, Deming, and Friedman argue, elite colleges currently hold the power to diversify the class backgrounds of those on the ladder to leadership in the U.S. In the meantime, some states are intervening to end legacy admissions through legislation. It will be much harder to end preferences the non-academic parts of a student's application: private school attendance, extra-curricular activities for students who don't have to work, and letters of recommendation from well-connected friends and relatives. And the top equestrian and tennis student athletes will always come from privileged families.
But transparency about who gets on the ladder to political and economic power makes it harder to justify the persistent preservation of intergenerational privilege as being primarily about merit.
