@Magnetron, why do you say “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?” I mean, why do you think Colorado College is a rich-kid favorite? In my (upper middle class) part of town, the rich kid favorites are UMich, Boulder and NYU. And with its 15% acceptance rate, Colorado College is nobody’s sure thing.
Colorado Colllege’s RD acceptance rate was 9% last year.
Numbers don’t tell all the story. Colorado College tends to attract a certain type of student (besides rich kids 
). I can imagine a lot of them not being driven by or drawn to jobs based on income level.
BTW, my hairdressers make more than many college grads I know and I don’t go to super expensive ones. The guy I went to before I relocated 20 years ago was making around $70K in the mid-90s in a city with a very moderate cost of living.
@austinmshauri said:
Just as a college has every right (within the law) to assemble the class it wants, families too have the right (again within the law) to make the situation as advantageous to themselves as possible. A college’s desire to create a economically diverse class does not supersede a family’s goal to minimize its costs.
Lowest net price at Harvard for domestic students is $4,600 (student work expectation). Highest parental income to give a $0 parental contribution ($4,600 net price) is around $65,000 for one student in college, based on https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculator . This includes much of the middle income range as well as the lower income range.
If you go down to the scatter plot of income vs. parents income you can see all the data points. Colorado College is the farthest point to the right, highest median parent income at $277,500, #1 of all colleges.
Also on the scatter plot, Bennington is easy to spot, by itself at about $115,000 family income and on the $20,000/yr line. Hovering over the other dots to the left (lower family income) of Bennington in the neighborhood of that $20,000/yr horizontal line, you bump into a whole bunch of hair and beauty school names. No moral or social judgement on those careers. My wife’s hairdresser makes more and lives better than I do.
Sorry if I missed this in the discussion but where is this data even derived from? Nobody has ever asked me my income level when my kids applied to college…
@doschicos http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/data/
Doesn’t exactly answer your question but there’s an email if anyone wants to ask…
In response to the questions about how they got your family income - If you look at the data notes in the papers, they start with the Social Security “Death Master file” to find everyone by their birth year. Colleges are required to report to the IRS on Form 1098-T about every student who does not have tuition waived so that taxable scholarships can get taxed. After the researchers matched the SSA death file and the 1098-Ts, the researchers looked up dependents claimed on tax returns in the IRS Databank to get at parental household income. Only US taxpayers are included, so well-heeled internationals students are not counted in these analyses. They are also prohibited from reporting actual data from fewer than 10 tax units. So they cannot report the exact number of students at a particular income level at an individual college (though they have the data). Instead they created a regression model based on the overall data and then applied that model to the characteristics of individual colleges. That’s why they are careful to say their individual school income breakdowns are estimates.
On why it matters that so many students come from the top 1% versus the bottom 60% - We think of college as a driver of economic mobility. Elite schools claim to educate the future elite. They don’t claim to be only for those that were born to elite parents. But, all these colleges get an enormous amounts of public money in the form of financial aid and research funds and tax exemptions on their endowments (biggest public subsidy for the Ivies) and most are exempt from local property taxes too. What responsibility do elite colleges have to provide opportunities for the large majority of Americans versus the 1%?
Most didn’t come from families making more than $80k and nice snide comment about 1990 dollars despite the fact most of those CUNY alums I referred to above were toddlers/early elementary school aged back in that decade.
You’re also fail to consider other possibilities such as the bureaucrats making mistakes about eligibility, bureaucratic snafus delaying payment from those sources, or possibilities those sources may not fully cover all tuition/expenses in practice due to budget shortfalls during certain years.
A possibility I don’t dismiss especially considering back when I was in HS, the NY Regents Scholarship program did end up getting scandalized in the local papers when they ended up in such a budget shortfall to the point they had “no money” to provide funds for the scholarship and yet, had enough money to mail out checks for $0 to scholarship recipients…including some older HS classmates.
Also, there’s a growing issue of community college students at the CUNY 2 year schools accumulating some debt according to friends who teach/admin there.
"What responsibility do elite colleges have to provide opportunities for the large majority of Americans versus the 1%? "
The elites have never been all that much about this. But they are probably doing more today than they ever have.
When I was growing up first gen and lower middle class, I wasn’t thinking about attending an Ivy or even a state U that had dorms. I certainly wasn’t thinking about a private college that had things like frats, lacrosse teams and a golf course.
For me and my siblings it was CC, CUNY or a local commuter school. That’s still where mobility is most likely to happen.
Tuition at CUNY is $6330 for the 4 year colleges and $4300 for the 2 year colleges(today) Again, as long as your family income is below 80k and you are a NYS resident, granted while you will not get the full $5165 in TAP, but you will receive a TAP award.
People who are full pay taking out loans to attend CUNY fall into the following categories;
They are not Citizens or permanent residents making them ineligible for federal or state aid
They have parents who are not NYS residents making them ineligible for NYS aid ( your parents must physically living in NYS)
Yes I CUNY the first year you had to pay tuition and they introduced TAP
Their family has an income where they may not be financially eligible for TAP or Pell, or their income at a level where they are receiving TAP or PELL
At the CUNY community college if you are in ASAP as long as you receive at least $5 in either TAP or PELL , your tuition fees, books and metro cards are covered.
What bureaucrats are making mistakes regarding eligibility ? You file the FAFSA and the TAP forms. You meet the economic guidelines for federal or state aid or you don’t. There has never, Even a time since they have been awarding TAP that it was not funded by the state. If your friend had regents scholarships that did not get paid out and as a result had to take loans then they were not eligible for or their income kep them from receiving federal or state aid ( which are entitlements if you are eligible and meet satisfactory academic progress)
You really got stop listening to these friends, because many of them do not know what they are talking about.
I think that is assuming that everyone acts in a rational manner. I know a student who took out a student loan even though her tuition, rent, etc were paid by relatives. She wanted to have a one bedroom apartment rather than have room mates. Short sighted, I know, but she didn’t need to have taken out a loan.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Since elite colleges have effectively made tuition a percentage of income and assets, it makes sense for smart people to minimize the income and assets to the extent allowable under the rules that the colleges make up.
Very interesting data. As always the devil is in the details. I agree with most of your comments but not the last. Going to school at all is still more important than where. A school with much better upward income mobility also likely has more students starting from a lower point. Or said another way, if most students are already affluent they have less upward mobility “space” to move creating a lowered score for the school.
One more point, the data does not indicate that being wealthier indicates you have a better chance of getting in to an elite school but it does indicate you have a better chance of actually attending if you do get in. Many students turn down expensive schools (elite or not) for less expensive options.
Definitely. But my point was not compared with those who don’t go to college at between colleges.
You can see on the one chart that low income students attending a “selective public” school end up in a lower income percentile (10-15% lower) than than low income students attending an ivy+ or “elite” school.
@insanedreamer, yes, but the quality of the kids also matter, so how do you control for that?
We have no reason to believe that, on average, the low-income kids who go to selective publics are the exact same aptitude as low-income kids who go to those other schools.
… and outcomes. Kudos to NYT for such a nice user-friendly presentation of the data.
detailed data on each college here:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobility/dartmouth-college
Very interesting observations. I’ve only heard anecdotally which universities “rich kids” go to, it’s interesting to see the actual data, and which schools have more diversity.
It’s also clear - not that we needed confirmation - that being wealthier significantly increases your chances of getting into an elite school.
Some schools also have much better “upward income mobility” than others, which I feel counters what seems to be the “accepted wisdom” here on CC that “it doesn’t matter what college you go to”.
“yes, but the quality of the kids also matter, so how do you control for that?”
The inputs matter a LOT.
Kids who can get into Harvard or Yale will tend to do pretty well. Regardless of what their Harvard/Yale experience is. And regardless of whether they attend Harvard/Yale.
Yes, it is the details. However, the mobility data “space” (as you put it) difference among colleges was corrected for by analyzing these data as percentages rather than absolute numbers.
There will be noise/error in these data if the absolute numbers are very small. In other words, the percentage data will be more accurate with increasing numbers of students in the group being analyzed.