School With The Most Students That Come From Wealthy Families

College Search & Selection
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<p>I don’t much care about the OP’s motivations or “attitude.” I think it’s an interesting question, but one that’s not easy to answer. One clue is how many full-pays there are in the student body. That’s a flawed measure, however. If the schools had identical cost-of-attendance and identical financial aid policies, the percentage of full-pays would be a very revealing figure. But even among elite private colleges and universities, COA varies, and FA policies vary even more. </p>

<p>Here are the percentages of full-pays at the top 25 private research universities. I suspect HYP rank near the bottom of this list, with the fewest full-pays, largely because they have the most generous FA policies. Still, there’s a huge difference between MIT with only 33% fully-pays, and WUSTL and Tufts with 61% full-pays.</p>

<p>WUSTL 61%
Tufts 61%
Wake Forest 60%
Georgetown 59%
USC 58%
Rice 57%
Brown 56%
Duke 55%
Johns Hopkins 54%
Penn 53%
Chicago 53%
Northwestern 53%
Vanderbilt 53%
Carnegie Mellon 52%
Cornell 51%
Emory 51%
Dartmouth 50%
Notre Dame 50%
Stanford 49%
Columbia 48%
Caltech 46%
Yale 44%
Princeton 41%
Harvard 40%
MIT 33%</p>

<p>Does this tell us who has the richest students? Well, no. We don’t know where, among these schools, the super-rich congregate. At most schools a household income of $180K to $200K will make you a full-pay, but that’s nowhere near the top 1% in income or wealth. You can be sure that at a private school with 50% to 60% full-pays, the student body will be pretty affluent. But the wealthiest? That’s anybody’s guess.</p>