^ I agree. How do they get this data? I would not think a top 1% is filling out a FAFSA or any other form. They are private people. Do you think Trump sent his financial statements to a college for his kids? I doubt it. They just pay the bill.
Tax returns are private so if the top 1% does not send in financial information, then how is it gathered?
I also wish they would have provided some income figures for the stratification. What is the income number for the top 20%? Bottom 20%? Etc. I could not find that.
And thanks for the tip about clicking on the school for more detail. I enjoyed that tidbit.
@MassDaD68 the first sentence of this report says it. The researchers must have tax return data without peopleās names and computers can match the tuition paying students to their families, I guess.
I read a couple of these articles coming from the same data source. I THINK one said that the top 20% is income of $110,000. (This is why I posted on a different thread about needing to be careful when we talk about āmiddle classā because income that is actually in the middle of the income distribution is much lower than we typically think of, when we think of middle class. )
To me, one of the most interesting questions regarding mobility is how much mobility from top 20% to top 5% (for example). The articles I saw focused on MEGA mobility.
I also think it is interesting to focus not just on the first number in that table in the article linked at the top of this thread (i.e., the percentage with parents in the top 1%) but also the gap between the two numbers (gap between top 1% and bottom 60%). Some schools that have the first number greater than the second have a very small gap between the two, while others have a huge gap (e.g., Washington University in St. Louis). Someone above mentioned SMU - see that their gap is pretty small (so lots of super wealthy but also lots of lower income).
ābased on millions of anonymous tax filings and tuition recordsā
^^^Totally creepy, but I continue to salivate over the excellent presentation of the data by the NYT. They must have hired some recent grads from top colleges!! *
*1 caveat- agree that the first graphic with the boxes and college names is confusing and they didnt make it clear that is based on raw counts not percentages.
I feel gratified that our perceptions of the socio-economic vibe at Dās top three LAC choices were actually. accurate. D did not choose her ED school on that basis, but it was probably part of the feeling of fit. For example, we really liked one of the NESCACās but on our tour all the other students in the group were obviously very wealthy and were attending boarding schools, so that gave us pause. On her list, but ultimately not top 3, was Bryn Mawr. We wouldnāt have guessed that theyāre one of the more diverse colleges. In fact, since they have a 25% international population, we assumed the opposite. Maybe the money of rich internationals allows for greater economic diversity among the US students? Regardless, I wish we had had this data earlier.
A little bit of ādevilās advocateā here ā Iād argue that one of the many good reasons to attend an Ivy League school is to rub elbows with the elite, where elite is proxied as very high income. After all, these are the folks who will be running huge companies one day, running for elected office, becoming partners with corner offices at major law firms, etc. This exposure helps builds social networks that last a lifetime.
Of course, if the student is himself in the top 1%, then this exposure may not be so beneficial.
I was kinda surprised to see my daughterās school (Brown) at the very top of the list for 1%ers, but also noted that it has a fairly high in the bottom 60% category as well. The two percentages are nearly equal. That seems like a good balance to me. Given that Brown also works hard on other sorts of diversity - it seems like it will offer a good balance of benefits for my NON-1% and NON-bottom 60% kid.
Iāve been following your other posts where you indicated your family income is ~$500k/year but your parents want to juggle their income to make it look like they earn $120k/year so you can qualify for aid. That aid youāre trying to finagle is offered to ācreate a class of economically diverse studentsā. There is something wrong about believing itās not a collegeās responsibility to create an economically diverse class while performing financial gymnastics to try to qualify for the grants they offer to create one.
@austinmshauri donāt understand how my pervious post is related at all to this thread.
A private institutionās job should not be to create an economically diverse class. It irritates me that this article calls out pretty much al the schools that offer full needs met financial aid and basically says theyāre not doing enough.
@profdad2021
Letās look at generational wealth where grandparents or perhaps even great grandparents poured their sweat to build success. Perhaps these business creators came from modest backgrounds and worked extremely hard - nothing was handed to them.
Their children perhaps lived well. Resources and advantages provided to them. They were taken care of. Never had to worry about anything. Maybe generation two were not as motivated. Didnāt feel the need to work as hard. Money opened doors to colleges their parents could not have afforded. They were not stars in the classroom. Inherited money. Did not take school as seriously as some of their classmates who had a burning desire to succeed.
Now fast forward to third generation. They lived really well growing up. Perhaps their parents were not extremely motivated but lifestyle oriented - and were alumni of elite schools. These grandkids now legacies felt to be birthright to also attend these elite colleges, be in the same secret societies. Live off their trust funds and simply enjoy life.
So rubbing elbows with these trust fund kids may or not be productive. The family business has been sold. The grandkids may not work much because they can live off what was handed down to them. Fancy cars, exotic trips, beautiful homes. But these might not be the rising stars with a burning desire their grandparents were decades ago. Or even have major businesses to run - that has been cashed in.
@ClarinetDad16 Your description probably fits in under the ātop .1%ā better. If youād want to know how many of those people there are, each college says their percentage
The point of the article is that while these schools tout their excellent financial aid as bringing in economic diversity, they are not really achieving it. If one goal of higher education and of our nation in general is to allow upward mobility and continue the idea that hard work will get you out of poverty, these schools are not doing enough to make that happen. There are lots of reasons for that.
But looking at the bottom 60% - which includes the median income - is not just looking at very poor kids. Lots of regular kids, likely from working class or lower level white collar families, are not considered for these schools because they donāt have access to the perks of the top 1% (or even the top 20%) that allow them to stand out. As we hear over and over, a kid with very high SATs and near perfect grades, still has to have something else to attract the elite colleges. A kid from a mediocre HS in a suburban area would have less chance at achieving that something extra than a kid at a top public or a private HS. A HS that almost never sends a student to an elite college is not on the radar of top colleges and the 4.0 GPA may not be counted the same way as the GPA from a HS known to be one of the best and most challenging.
As someone said upthread, every private non-profit college gets tax breaks and likely other federal or state support.
I havenāt read much of the article but I am curious what the ultimate point is. If it is that top tier universities are treating low SES students unfairly I might be inclined to want to know more. The study may indicate more of a lagging indicator rather than a leading indicator.
I guess I look at this from a different perspective. Some of this is geographic and some of this is socioeconomic. East coast schools (thus the Ivys) are going to get more attention from those on the coasts and less from other parts of the country. Second is that as your SES increases the importance of attending such schools. SES in many cases reflects a parents education backround, values, the neighborhood they live in (gentrification), and the expectations they have for their children. It will be much more important to a family living in a gated community in DC, NYC or Boston to have their child attend a top tier school than for a child in a middle class suburb of Columbus OH or inner city Chicago. Middle to upper middle class students are likely going to end up at their state flagship and lower class students in commuter schools. It is where they will apply. The good news is that you can get to most places just as well in a Honda as a Mercedes.
What I am saying is that I suspect that the number of students who attend the top tier universities probably corresponds closely with number of QUALIFED students in each SES that apply. Harvard will not accept a student with a 3.0 GPA and a 1000 SAT score because they have a low SES. I also believe they will not deny a qualified student for the same reason.
Lots of interesting tidbits available in those graphics.
For example, S2 did not apply to Duke because the NC cousins said it was really only a friendly environment to the southern rich kids, though every private to which he did apply except Cornell skews richer.
Also, income at age 34 for Bennington (at around $20,000) is down there with the Beauty Schools, and rich-kid favorite Colorado College (around $40,000) is below almost all public colleges.
Of course, that presumes an intended career and social direction where social contacts with the scions of the elite are valuable, and that the potential limitation or exclusion of social contacts with those from more modest backgrounds is less of a problem (the ātalking to the plumberā thing). Also, not all scions of the elite are equally valuable as social contacts; the motivated ones will continue to achieve something on their own (building on their inherited advantages), while less motivated ones may just spend their inheritances (in which case there may actually be negative value in that a student associating with them may acquire spendy habits that are not sustainable for a student of more modest means).
That does not seem like real life, though. For someone whose social contacts are uniformly distributed across the income scale, those from the bottom 60% will be 60 times as numerous as those from the top 1%. Even allowing for the fact that college graduates are likely to have social contacts skewed upward on the income scale, is it really likely for someoneās contacts to have the top 1% so greatly overrepresented compared to the bottom 60%?
I always believed that it gave you an advantage in admissions if you are full pay. If you need a lot of FA you better have something extra these schools want.
Iād say a school like Georgia Tech, with 3.2% from the top 1%, and 21.9% from the bottom 60%, is a much more typical balance. Or MIT, with 5.7% from the top 1%, and 23.4% from the bottom 60%.
Then thereās some big state Uās like Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, etc. All around 6% from the top 1%, and around 21% from the bottom 60%.
@Magnetron, Iām going to wager a guess that some colleges have more starving artists and/or trust fund dilettantes and/or stay-at-home spouses as alums than others.
Also families that are full-pay can also afford the very best test prep, tutoring, pay for expensive ECs and apply ED, and send their kids to great high schools, all giving their children a leg up
Four years of current sticker price at these schools equals the cost of a Ferrari.
So this data is really no surprise. Especially since the academic and personal characteristics needed to get past the admissions standards are so strongly correlated to SES status.
So the fact that 20% of Harvard students, for example, pay zero is actually pretty strong. And most of those low income students today applying to Harvard never would have even considered applying 25 years ago.