Consider two students who apply to college with an SAT score of 1500, one from a family in the top 1% and another from a middle-class family. The student from the high-income family is more than twice as likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college as students from middle class families. A student whose parents are business executives are far more likely to be admitted to top-ranked colleges than a student with the same high school test scores and grades whose parents are teachers or bus drivers.
If students from the top 1% were admitted to Ivy-Plus schools at the same rate as middle-class students with the same SAT or ACT scores, the share of students from the top 1% at America’s top colleges would fall by nearly half.
Three factors drive the high-income admissions advantage: legacy preferences, non-academic ratings, and athletic recruitment. Applicants from top 1% families whose parents attended an Ivy-plus college (“legacy applicants”) are five times more likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college than peers with comparable credentials whose parents did not attend. Students from high-income families also score higher on non-academic aspects of applications, largely because they are more likely to attend private high schools with greater access to extracurriculars, college counseling, and other support for the application process. Recruited athletes, who (perhaps surprisingly to many outside America) make up 10-15% of top American universities’ incoming students, also skew heavily toward high-income families who are able to hire the coaches and provide the support needed for students to excel in athletics.
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