Wealth And Academic Achievement

A New York Times columnist examines the complicated issue of the relationship between elite university admissions and wealth. It is complicated because to do it right from a meritocratic admissions baseline, you have to consider the fact that the children of the affluent have above average academic ability. (Hat tip to Fully Myelinated.)

About 7 percent of the country’s very top students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution. These students tend to have scored at least 1500 on the SAT (or 35 on the ACT), received top marks on Advanced Placement tests, earned almost all A’s in their high school classes, and often excelled in science fairs or other competitions. . . . 

Perhaps the most surprising pattern involves so-called legacy students, those who attend the same college that their parents did. At the elite colleges that the researchers studied, legacy students had stronger academic qualifications on average than nonlegacy students. Similarly, graduates of private high schools had stronger academic records on average than graduates of public high schools or Catholic schools. . . .

• Legacy is a major advantage. These colleges are inundated with strong applications. When admissions offices are making close calls among students with similar transcripts, legacy status acts as a trump card. About half of legacy students at these colleges would not be there without the admissions boost they receive. 

• A similar advantage applies to the graduates of private schools (not including religious schools). Schools like Andover, Brentwood and Dalton do such a good job of selling their students — through teacher recommendations, essay editing and other help — that colleges admit them more often than academic merit would dictate. Many college admissions officers think they can see through this polish, but they don’t. 

• Recruited athletes are admitted with much lower academic standards — and are disproportionately affluent. It’s not just true of the obvious teams, like golf, squash, fencing and sailing. In today’s era of expensive youth sports, most teams skew wealthy. If colleges changed their approach to sports, they could admit more middle-class and poor athletes (or nonathletes) with stronger academic credentials.

Most of these colleges do not admit only the hyper-qualified affluent students; they also admit many other high-income students. As I mentioned above, 7 percent of the country’s very best high school students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution. But what proportion of students at elite colleges comes from the top 1 percent of the income distribution? Much more: 16 percent.

As the chart below clarifies, worst odds are for students who are neither in the bottom 70% of affluence nor the top 1%, basically, the upper middle class, and, it's best to be ultra-rich if you want to get into an elite private college, although being a top tier athlete also helps.

The latest Planet Money newsletter also looks at the Chetty study and it’s implications:

As previously mentioned, the economists find that wealthy children, even when they have comparable SAT and ACT scores to less affluent kids, are much more likely to get into these elite schools. A student from the richest one percent of American families (from families earning over $611,000 per year) is twice as likely to attend an elite private college as a middle-class student (from a family earning between $83,000-$116,000 per year) with the same academic credentials. The economists find this disparity can only be found at elite private colleges: they find no such advantage for rich kids at America’s flagship public universities, like UC Berkeley or the University of Michigan.

“I think implicitly what we’re finding in the data is that — whether intentionally or not — we currently have a system that appears to have affirmative action for kids from the richest families, the top one percent in particular, which gives them a substantial leg up in admissions relative to other kids,” Chetty says.

UPDATE July 27, 2023:

The factors that give the rich an edge are also factors with zero or negative correlation with good post-college outcomes.

Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success.

It would be so easy to change all this, right? Use scores and grades more, legacy less, extracurriculars less, and athletics less for admission purposes.  

Via Tyler Cohen at Marginal Revolution.