<p>The income distribution from Penn is interesting, and I think it’s about the same at Stanford. 50-60% of the students receive aid, which ends at around $200k, suggesting that 40%+ make over $200k. Penn’s stats can be compared to the income distribution in the US:</p>
<p>[Household</a> income in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States]Household”>Household income in the United States - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>which shows that the higher the income, the more that demographic is overrepresented. </p>
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<p>To reiterate, this is not Penn’s fault. This is the fault of the US, with widespread income inequality roughly equal to that of Kenya or Uganda (which have virtually the same Gini coefficient as the US). Privileged students are overrepresented everywhere because they have more opportunity - one study found that at the top 146 colleges, only 3% came from the bottom economic quartile (Penn has 2x that proportion), while 74% come from the top economic quartile (which is a little higher than Penn’s proportion). This is a problem at all top universities. I wish others would release such detailed income statistics for their student bodies; they’re probably afraid of showing that the income inequality in the US, which is terrible (something like 67th in the world in a ranking of Gini coefficients), is far worse on their campuses.</p>
<p>At the same time, while this isn’t Penn’s fault, all the top universities including Penn should be working harder to balance the socioeconomic makeup of their student bodies. Having an accurate representation of the US income distribution is obviously not the goal (the student bodies would be just as unequal as the US population). Rather, the goal is to have an equal representation of incomes among their students, to give equal opportunity to all backgrounds. To that end, Penn is doing a great job, esp. with its recruitment of low-income students and its expanded financial aid to allow middle-income students to attend. But neither Penn nor its peers will be able to reach that goal with mere “admissions engineering.” It’s going to take significant improvement of the K-12 system and national policy ensuring a basic living standard for everyone, before the top private universities can hope to be the “conduits of social mobility” as they purport to be.</p>