Re: “A recent study by Bastedo and several co-researchers published in the Journal of Higher Education that analyzed higher-education institutions across the U.S. found that those that use holistic admissions are far more likely than those that don’t to enroll low-income students.”
The paper is here: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bastedo/papers/BastedoEtAl2018.pdf
Looks like the sample of universities in the study is from the top three tiers of competitiveness in Barron’s. This makes the claim more believable than what the quoted sentence suggests, since low-income students tend to be densest at moderately and less selective non-holistic-admission universities, such as most of the CSUs in California, and non-selective community colleges, which one might reasonably think when reading “higher-education institutions across the U.S.”.