But were there other factors in the previous century, such as college readiness, required education levels for many jobs, physical mobility, college information access, business/political news access… and their related costs, that served to pre-select those being able to apply (or consider attendance) in the first place?
Today, that “everyone” can fly across the country, or access the Internet, or consider attending college in general… the application numbers (and the inversely related acceptance rates) reveal the true state.
I get your point but it’s very likely that those other 440 CEOs probably come from, spitballing here, 100 other schools. Ought we be “on them” in the same way? Heck let’s go to the Fortune 5000. Should there be at least 1 CEO from each of the 3980 schools?
I agree that what we’re seeing in that graph is the dreaded “donut hole,” but remember, these are acceptance rates for kids who have actually applied.
My question-suspicion is: is that no-FA, not-comfortably-full-pay bucket a relative soft spot for yield, and have the colleges adjusted admissions rates accordingly.
Specifically, this “12% of CEOs” stat seems like a severely trailing indicator, as CEOs were typically educated many decades ago. I suspect that intervening changes in society, particularly with regard to diversity, may have blunted some of this effect already. What if we discovered that, when broken down by generational cohort, the percentage of Ivy-educated F500 CEOs was 29% for those matriculating in the 1970s and before, 15% in the 1980s, and 7% in the 1990s and after? Those are hypothetical numbers, but the fact that they are plausible within the boundaries of the reported statistic indicates to me that the stat may not be telling us very much.
But wasn’t the higher admission rate in the 1940s-1950s mainly gated by admitting mostly from SES-elite prep schools (most of such admits would be the “gentleman C” students) plus a small number of actual academically elite students from all over?
Of course, as noted by another poster above, the SES-elite (and their prep schools) have had to up their academic game so that they now need to be plausibly “typical excellent” at least in academic factors these days (and the “gentleman C” in college is now the “gentleman A-”).
Also,
These acceptance rates aren’t broken out by early decision vs regular decision. I am curious how these acceptance rate vs income graphs would look for ED vs RD.
So, we see kids with parents in the 80th to 90th percentile of income, many of whom do not apply because they are not comfortable being full pay, but even if they do apply they are still significantly less like to be accepted.
One possible explanation is that they are less likely to attend and universities are protecting yield.
Another possible explanation is that they are likely to be non-legacy white or Asian, and that legacy students and children of big donors are also likely to be white or Asian, and many of the “white and Asian” spots have been taken up by legacy students implying that the non-legacy students are less likely to get in.
Perhaps if we had stats for “schools that consider legacy” versus “schools that do not consider legacy” we might be able to guess regarding whether this is a factor (I am not a fan of legacy admissions, and am pleased that my undergraduate alma mater does not consider legacy).
I suppose that there could be some connection to expensive private high schools.
This might be a good point. If the parents are uncomfortable with the cost, then applying ED might be less likely.
Another possible explanation is that we just do not understand the reason for this.
Certainly the academically strong students who we have known (friends of our kids and kids of our friends and neighbors and colleagues) who are somewhere around about the 80th or 90th percentile of income are most likely to attend schools that are either public or offer merit aid or both. We see quite a few kids attending public schools with merit aid (including both of ours).
Random aside, but there is a whole other story here about “public” universities that nonetheless have played a similar role in educating the socioeconomic elite of certain states or sometimes regions, particularly in parts of the country where “elite” colleges, and really high-education economic clusters in general, were less likely to locate back in the very early days. Eventually that changed, but by then the “land grant” era had taken off, and so a lot of “top” colleges in these areas are in those universities.
And as usual, elites found ways to be elite even within colleges. Obviously this happened at private colleges too, but, say, certain fraternities at certain public colleges might have had multi-generational relationships with certain elite families, and so on.
Anyway, those elite public universities, and sometime elite subsets of those public universities, then had their own loyal alumni networks and such. And to this day, their graduates are also disproportionately represented in elite positions, at least within their primary jurisdiction.
And then there are the elite Catholic universities . . . .
So self-perpetuating elitism is definitely not just an Ivy League thing. And I agree if you looked generally at top business executives, you’d like find many more, I would not be surprised if it was most, were a product of SOME sort of relevant elite network. Of which the Ivies are one, but not the only, and not necessarily the most important in various communities.
I am not sure the legacy effect is any different than for other schools valuing different factors.
Legacy parents likely know more about what is required and value education early, devoting resources to cultivate it. Similarly, I expect Julliard contains zero students who began to play the piano in high school-more likely they are started in preschool. And they come from families who probably themselves both have and value musical talent highly. Similarly, some families seem to have great athletic genes, prioritize that, and their kids are great athletes who started playing sports very young and devoted lots of time to it. It isn’t surprising that families who cultivate a talent very early produce higher performers than others.
The use of legacy preferences at Harvard that gives a significant admissions boost beyond what would be expected based on academic qualifications alone is pretty well-established.
“We find that a white non-ALDC applicant with a 10% chance of admission would see a five-fold increase in admissions likelihood if they were a legacy”
The 8 Ivies graduate, what, 12K undergrads per year? Total # of 22 year olds is around 4 million/year. So, Ivy (under)grads amount to about 0.30% of the population. If they’re 12% of Fortune 500 grads, then they’re overrepresented by about 40x.
This is definitely a common theory, and in fact was one of the “correlation, not bias” theories that came up in the Harvard context.
Basically, the theory is lots of middle- to upper-middle class families in the U.S. choose to get “good” K-12 schools for their kids by living in “good” public school districts, rather than sending their kids to expensive private schools.
And then, the theory goes, many of those families make the same decision again at the college level, opting for good public universities at a lower cost (either because of in-state, or because of merit scholarships and such), over more expensive private colleges.
And even if they would consider switching over–jumping from one of these tracks to the other track is, the theory goes, understandably not always that easy. As in, your good public school might be very experienced in sending a lot of kids to good public universities, and tailored to support that goal, but less so for elite private colleges where fewer of their graduates go.
On the other hand, the percentage of students in selective private colleges is higher than the percentage of students in selective private high schools. So obviously some families are hoping to jump tracks at that particular point. And at least some pull it off.
But still, they have not necessarily made it easy by choosing a path like that. And this is not necessarily a comfortable message for people who have chosen that path, and it is understandable why private colleges might not talk about it much voluntarily.
But when the choice is that or ethnic bias, suddenly people get much more willing to suggest being on a private school track K-12 actually might help continuing on that track in college.
If anything, I suspect there has been/will be somewhat of an expansion of the 12% of CEOs, at least among those CEOs who attended undergrad colleges in the US. (Obviously there will be some who attend undergrad in France or India and merely polish off with a grad degree at an Ivy in the US).
And, if we expand a bit to Ivy Plus (a somewhat more expansive Ivy Plus than included in the Chetty paper - adding CalTech, Northwestern and maybe a couple others to MIT etc), then we’d likely see even higher %s…
Meh. So if they were represented evenly there would be, wait for it, one or two. And? These 58-59 “extra” CEOs are really all that problematic to your worldview? 8ish per school? Really? What’s your end goal - the Fortune 500 CEOs come from 500 different schools? And? So?
About those depressed admit rates for applicants in the income range between low-70%ile (about $115k) and mid-90%ile (about $250k), another possible contributor could be the effect of elite private high schools. Families of many of the applicants in that income range probably need to save for their kids’ colleges and couldn’t afford to also pay for elite private high schools. Since students at elite private high schools are similarly barbelled, and according to this study, they were also highly favored by the elite private colleges, it may not be surprising that applicants in that income range have lower admit rates to these colleges.
Human beings have always been tribal and status conscious.
Is there any wonder that the majority of the US presidents who attended college received an Ivy league education? Similarly, most of the US Supreme Court justices also attended an Ivy league school.
Back in the day, only those in the know and the elite knew where to send their children for their education. In any event, a college education was out of reach for most people. Standards have changed. One can argue that USNWR merely codified that knowledge and disseminated it to the masses.
The Ivy Plus are much more selective now than they were 1-2 generations ago. A lot more massively intelligent and ambitious people at them (both total # and as %), and many of those people have access to significant financial resources, directly or indirectly. Plus some really elite foreign students.
And I think mediocre 3rd/4th gen sons of industry are far less likely to attend an Ivy and also to ascend to and hold the top seat at a Fortune 500 these days. August Busch IV was not brilliant. He went to St. Louis U (not an Ivy Plus), and, while he was briefly atop A-B (a decade or two ago), I doubt HIS offspring will be (not sure what kids he has).