“These aren’t just elite institutions, they’re elitist institutions”

Parents Forum
221

Quant- what is new about the phenomenon you’re posting about?
I went to college back in the olden days (1970’s). I didn’t know ANYONE who was rich growing up. To us, the successful person in the neighborhood was a dentist- solo practice, and he worked pretty much around the clock. He drove a nicer car than the guy down the street who owned a carpet store.

I got to college and all of a sudden- wow. To the “scholarship kids” (yes, that was the term) it was massive culture shock.

But guess what- there were kids who came from lots of money who were low key and humble and kind and generous, and kids who came from money who were obnoxious and self-centered and didn’t care about anyone else. This is not news.

It took a couple of semesters for me to figure out some of the “code”, because growing up in a place with a lot of first gen Americans (one of my parents) and neighbors who were teachers and librarians and social workers and people who owned small retail businesses does not prepare someone to understand multi-generational wealth initially. But you catch on.

And of course the biggest piece of learning- someone can be rich and come from a family where devoting yourself to the needs of others and being modest in your spending and consumption is ingrained in you from day one; and someone can be rich and spend their time complaining about the cost of detailing a BMW (in a neighborhood where many of the locals did not own cars and were dependent on a sub par public transportation system).

This was the 1970’s. Doesn’t sound like much has changed.

There was one phenomenon though which fascinated me- we called them “Euro-trash” even though many of them were from oil families in the Middle East (no real presence of wealthy Asians at the time, or if they were there, they flew under the radar). A few had body guards. Most owned fancy cars and spent the weekends out of town- flying hither and yon, or partying in NYC. They were NOTHING like the American uber rich kids, most of whom had inherited wealth and were loath to flaunt it or even talk about it.

I remember a visit to a close friend- I had gathered that there was some pretty significant family money. The house was astonishing- absolutely massive and gorgeous, in an old historic neighborhood in a fancy New England town. Equally astonishing was the inside- old, falling apart, nothing had been touched in decades, shabby upholstery and dogs shedding all over the place and nobody noticing. A couple of recognizable paintings on the walls and a few stunning antiques- but the rest looked like the Mayflower had taken on water and the family had saved what they could and then lived with it as it was rotting.

Nobody I had known growing up lived this way. Houses might have been modest, but the kids were not allowed in the living room (let alone pets) and there was generally a sense of upkeep even if the furniture was from Sears and the dining set had been bought with S&H Green Stamps (like in our house).

So my first real lesson in “The rich are different than you and me” especially if the wealth was inherited.

But then- as now- there were the rich kids who were the first to volunteer to run the coat drive, tutor in the local public schools, hand out sandwiches at midnight to the homeless-- and the rich kids who were oblivious. I don’t think any of this is news.

222

I have question about the data being used here, by @Data10 and @MWolf (with whose messages I generally agree). This is something I have been wondering about for a while, but have been too lazy to research for myself.

When we talk about quintiles of household income, what gets defined as a “household”? And how are college-eligible young people distributed among those families?

For example, when my son was 24, in graduate school and living on borrowed funds and about $15,000 from part-time jobs, and seriously involved with a third-year medical student . . . was he a “household”? Now married, and homeowners, they are clearly a household, and – *miraculously/i – my son’s economic status has improved. With a graduate degree and a couple of promotions, his income has more than quadrupleld, and his household income has gone up by a factor of ten, because he’s married to someone who also has a valuable graduate degree. By the time they have kids, and their kids are ready to go to college, those kids are overwhelmingly likely to belong to a top-quintile household.

Over the course of my kid’s adult life, his “household” will have spent time in every income quintile. His college-eligible children, however, will only belong to one income quintile. So why should we be assuming that college-eligible children are evenly distributed among the income quintiles?

I am not trying to deny the existence of poverty in America, or to deny the existence of poor children. The bottom income quintile does not primarily consist of elitist graduate students at elite universities. But I do think that families with children graduating from high school and prepared for college are not likely evenly distributed among the household income quintiles. I think the people in the bottom quintile are likely to be significantly younger or significantly older, and significantly more single, than the parents of college-eligible kids and their children. Is that incorrect?

223

The comment about a dentist reminds me that despite growing up in a new suburban neighborhood, where many of the dads were young engineers, just outside a town full of Italian American first gens, whose dads had worked in the factory, that dentist who later moved down the street was the first Japanese American nearby.

My extended family lived in an ethnic/immigrant factory town. I recall zero Blacks or Hispanics. Or Jewish families. The only internationals were whites of slavic or Italian descent. The big distinction was whether a family went to the Roman Catholic or Eastern Catholic churches.

We moved to suburban DC, where the SES range was considerably higher, in many cases, pretty much as high as one can get, a different and much more diverse world. College was lots of rich kids.

Does that make it certain I or others were racist? No. Classist? No, though we were aware of deep poverty down the hill. Elitest? No.

But the focus, on many threads, is money, pure and simple. Imho, a fixation on those with more money, demonizing them. As if they can’t possibly be decent folk, open minded, democratic in thinking, looking for individual merit. No, just demons.

And couched in the supposed concerns about the poor, this stereotyping I refer to. As if the poor are all one dimensional, unable, unaware, never exposed, struggling versus striving. Challenges? Yes. Doomed? No. Striving? Can certainly be.

Ask yourselves about your own prejudices.

224

Another aside, about how at elite colleges many of the rich kids drive beat-up old cars. (That was certainly true in my day at my elite college. At my kids’ elite college, hardly anyone had a car at all. Some kids from local families would sometimes borrow one from home. Everyone had access to Zipcar, and there was excellent public transportation. So cars barely mattered.)

When my kids were entering 11th and 9th grades, they switched from a fancy private school with mostly wealthy kids to a much larger public school with a wide range of wealth among the families. For a number of excellent reasons, we gave them (well, the one with a driver’s license) daily use of the family’s seven-year-old baseline Dodge Caravan.

That fall, the biggest gossip topic at their old school was that the parents of one of my daughter’s former classmates had given him a Hummer when he got his driver’s license, and he was driving it to school. I ran into his mother at a party, and she explained, “I have no illusions about my son’s responsibility. I hope he’ll grow up to be responsible some day. But right now, he’s driving himself and his brother to school every day, and there’s a really high likelihood that he will screw up at some point. When that happens, I want both my boys to be walking away from it.” Which didn’t make complete sense, but was heartfelt.

I made some sort of joke about the kids Hummer to my kids, and my daughter quietly said, “You know, in the context of our new school, our old minivan is as outrageous and ostentatious as Joey’s Hummer at the old school. There are 6,500 kids at the school and maybe 50 cars in the student lot. And most of those are only operable because the kids who own them also completely rebuilt them.” And she was right about that.

The point: Letting a kid drive a beat-up old car is a marker for wealth. Most families don’t have that option.

225

In reply to blossom’s question about what is different now: One issue is that fewer students across the country from the middle and upper middle class thought applied to the Ivies in the 1970’s. (I believe this is the case, just from the historical applications data.) So the reservation of spots for legacies was less of an issue, because far fewer people felt excluded by that.

I also put some blame on the decision to recenter the SAT’s. This generally raised scores for the same performances, and made more students believe that they had the scores that meant that they ought to get into Harvard. Again, this causes further resentment about the legacy admits. (No need for lookinforward to chime in with the “news” that admissions is not stats driven, and its more than just scores–I get that.)

People on this thread seem to know a kinder, gentler class of exceedingly wealthy people than I have come across. Entirely plausible, but I wish we could exchange sets of acquaintances!

226

Quant- I think you are oversimplifying the application issue. Back in the day, the idea that a middle class kid would apply to a college that required an airplane flight? This is before airline deregulation mind you- who did that? Many of my HS classmates (even many of the “affluent” ones) had never been on a plane. So who from St. Louis or Minneapolis or Seattle wanted to go to college in Hanover, NH? Legacy, shmegacy, people weren’t jumping on airplanes-- you needed to 'go somewhere"? Greyhound. And the GC’s at my HS would have freaked out at the idea that a kid was applying to 12 colleges.

There was no internet- we got our college information from binders in the guidance counselors office. No kid in Vermont was going to “discover” Rhodes or Rice or Reed all by themselves.

The Val from my HS class went to a local nursing school (the only girl to have taken both AP Calc and AP Physics) and got an RN, later a BSN. Parents thought she should be able to support herself. Nowadays, she’d be one of the kids on CC looking for a college 2,000 miles from home which could give her a free merit ride, and then med school. But that was then.

re: kind and gentle wealthy people- your posts do not resonate with me, which doesn’t mean that they aren’t accurate. But many of my college friends- “old money” types, were raised in Yankee Calvinist type families where public service was the name of the game. They did Peace Corps after college; there was always an uncle who had led a Freedom Rider contingent down South and there was usually an aunt or sibling who had been in jail protesting the Viet Nam war. And of course- their dads had ALL served in the military if physically able. Being rich and wearing a uniform was not the contradiction it became later on. What distinguished them? Real Estate, and lots of it. Summer cottage (which was a dump, as I learned) on coastal Maine which sat on a humungous plot of land with various outbuildings where other relatives lived. Or Nantucket, Newport, Block Island. A pied a terre in NYC which was bigger than my parents house. The “family home” where grandmama lived- again, often a dump, but huge, and with staff, and either near the water (Greenwich, CT; Marblehead, MA) or rolling hills somewhere.

But to meet them on neutral territory- at college, or later, on the job where we were all plebes together? Not too many “tells”. I did learn though- the girls got pearls when they graduated from college (even the boho/counter culture ones) and the boys got Cartier watches or similar. So we may have all been in a managerial training program earning $11K per year- but some of them were wearing many thousands of dollars of bling (subtle, but expensive) while the rest of us wore costume jewelry and a Timex which we quickly upgraded to a Swatch when those came in.

227

Having asked my question (in #221), it turned out to be easy to answer it, at least partially.

Here’s the easiest available data: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-hinc/hinc-05.html

It doesn’t quite answer the question how college-eligible kids are distributed, but it does confirm some of my doubts about the way we talk about income distribution and college.

First, 26.5% of all “family” households are in the top income quintile, and only 11.4% are in the bottom income quintile. If the household includes a married couple, roughly a third are in the top quintile, and less than 7% in the bottom quintile. A household with a married couple is more than 20% more likely to be in the top 5% of all households by income than in the bottom 20%.

Second, of households where the “householder” is 45-54 – the age range, I think, of most parents of 17-22 year-olds – almost 30% are in the top income quintile, and only 13% and change are in the bottom income quintile. The distribution is a little more even in the 10-year age ranges on either side of that group, but only a little. In the aggregate, one-third of households led by 35-64 year-olds are in the top income quintile.

If there are two earners in the household, more than a third are in the top income quintile, and 2.5% are in the bottom quintile. If there are more than two earners – which would include a high school kid with a job in a family where both parents work – over half are in the top quintile, and less than 1% in the bottom quintile.

Anyway, I think the bottom line is that it is very unlikely that kids in a position to attend college full time (17-24 year-old high school graduates) are evenly distributed across income quintiles. There should be many more of them in the top income quintile than in the bottom. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there are no kids eligible to attend college in the bottom income quintile, just that it’s not 20% of all such kids. Meanwhile, it’s likely that the top income quintile includes as much as 30% of all college eligible kids.

228

Even though we would like to we can’t put every person in a certain bubble based on some statistics or characteristics. Really people are like a bell curve and not just their income. Basically what I trying to say there are always exceptions/outliers to any group.

Sometimes we like to romanticize the exceptions when it is a good story. For example, the low income kid that makes a 1600 and gets into every ivy. It can work the opposite as well. For example, the rich kid of say a billionaire who ends up getting arrested. Those are the stories that get the headlines and we see in the media.

What we fail to realize or see all the time is where the masses are and end up. We can slice income up any way we want but the results will all be similar. Kids that come from families with better incomes have better results as a whole. Now remember we all know the exceptions.

It is no surprise that at expensive(higher cost) sleep-away college that there would be more kids from families that are in the higher income brackets. Some of those kids are down to earth and don’t let money influence their behavior. Then some really let money totally influence their behavior. But really there are plenty of kids in the middle.

The real question is where is the middle. The middle is where the masses are. At some schools the middle kids might be highly influenced by money and act that way. Plenty of kids don’t understand what it means to be poor. They only have an abstract view of it from their own environment. Ironically the same can be said of kids that don’t understand what it means to be rich/well-off.

I went to a school where I know I was in the bottom 20-25% of family income. Did most kids accept me? Yes. Were there some kids that were out of touch because of their family money? Sure. Did it affect my everyday life? Not a ton.

At the end of the day there are jerks in every quintile of income. The problem is the higher you are in the quintile the more likely you are to have some sort of power over others and it is easy to be elitist.

In the immortal words of Groucho Marx “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.”

229

But it’s not all about wealth figures. Some average kids have travelled more, back to their family home countries. (Can see this on CC, even FA kids.) Many wealthy or wealthier are not old money, where their lives are in a multi-generation bubble of others with heaps of discretionary income. Many are from families that recently made money, through hard work. Many of these are still tied to family values- church, community, culture. Same as poorer families.

I never knew anyone with a Cartier watch until post grad school. Not from my ta-ta high school or college. The big joke, post college, was a women’s fake Cartier (blue wind knob, similar shape. Pretty.) You could tell a real Rolex, lol, by the “sweep second hand.” I did go to college with women from a certain region where a ring of their choice was the hs grad gift. Sure, there were diamonds. But it seemed ostentatious to me. And the way I was raised, ostentatious was/is not a value. The wrong sort of marker. Everyone, btw, was nice, save for a few with problems. I knew some guys who were trouble, rich alcoholics, sometimes aggressive, but the common thought, among all SES, was that these came from troubled lives, one way or another. (Seems, when we lump classes of kids into ranks, we forget the influence on behavior of family issues. And conversely, stable but poorer families could have strong family values and be quite nurturing.)

Imho, too much is accepted based on the wealth rank: that these kids are jetting off, spending vast gobs of money, looking down their snooty noses at anyone who doesn’t or can’t. Those boors don’t represent all monied folks.

I have no idea where most of you live. Different regions lean on different markers. But most kids in most areas, save for extremes, are aware what’s out there, know there are uber wealthy and uber poor. They see it. You can’t live in Manhattan or Marblehead or Malibu and miss it.

I don’t care if rich kids are meant to learn how many billionaires live in their states. I have no idea how many in my state.

230

Looking- there are PLENTY of places in the US where a kid could grow up and not know the extremes. The place I grew up for example- now there are more poor families, due to legislation mandating subsidized housing for private developers who want zoning variances, and there are more affluent families due to its proximity to a large city with good public transportation and a good public school system. But there are no housing projects per se- and the subsidized housing is indistinguishable from the apartments/condos around it. So for sure kids grow up in my old town not knowing about poor kids lives.

And rich? Are we talking a lawyer married to a pediatrician? Yes, plenty of those now. The social worker married to the school teacher have moved to cheaper towns. But nobody in the Bezos/Gates/Rockefeller vein.

My town is NOT unique. It is not Manhattan or Marblehead or Malibu. But take a look at census data- there are hundreds of small cities and towns where household income is clustered around the national mean (or regional mean in high property value cities/states). And a kid in one of those towns is really not going to know what it’s like for a kid who has never seen a dentist, or doesn’t eat breakfast or lunch on the weekends because the family relies on the free breakfast/lunch program at school without which they’d ALL be hungry. And similarly- they think “rich” is what they see on TV (i.e. Kardashian type lifestyles).

231

@JHS We can actually use the real numbers The same census will give you the actually number of 18021 year old kids in each income class. The number of 18-21 year old kids in the top 20th percentile is about 4,601,000, while the number is the bottom 20th percentile is a bit less than half of that (the number in the under $25,000 a year range is 1,911,000, and another 200,000 or so, since the bottom 20th cutoff is $25,500).

The total number of kids in that age group are about 16,155 so the proportion of people in the top 20th percentile by income is 28.5%, while the bottom is about 13%-14%. So your estimates aren’t too far off.

https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/hinc-03/2019/hinc03_6_1.xls

Many of these kids are actually householders themselves, about 38% of them. This actually points to something I wrote at the beginning of this thread. The biggest problem is poverty, not whether the “elite” colleges are accepting poor students. The majority are not even attending college, and over 1/3 are running households. Compared to this, the fact that they are not attending “elite” colleges at the 5% that the top 20th percentile are attending these colleges is really relatively minor. It’s really too bad that the 5% who could attend these colleges do not, but it’s worse that 60% of these kids should be able to attend a college but cannot.

If we look back at the data, and try to figure out what’s going on with the top 5%, it’s a bit more complex since the data is cut off at $200,000. However, if we assume that the number of kids per household in the $200,000-$250,000 group is similar to the $190K-$200K range, that would mean that there are about 910,000 of that age group. or about 5.6% of the total 18-21 age group.

The thing is that the group or households which has the highest proportion of college age kids, relative to their number of households are the 15th-20th percentile. They have 15% of the households, but about 22% of the college age kids.

Here is an interesting thing - if one looks through the “elite” colleges, and calculates the percent of kids from that income range attending these colleges, it rarely comes out to more than 27% of the kids attending, and usually less.

So this income range is not seriously overrepresented in the “elite” colleges. The serious imbalance is in the top 5% which make up about half the students at “elite” colleges, despite being fewer than 6% of the student age population.

This actually points to a high level of elitism at the “elites”. I would expect that there is little difference in the application profiles of kids from families making in the top 5% and those in the top 20%-top 5%. There is no indication of difference in stats or the quality of ECs - in fact, most of the kids who win national academic awards are within the second category. Yet the kids in the top 5% are almost 10 time more likely to attend an “elite” private college than the lower ranges of the top 20th percentile.

232

You can read the full methodology in the study text at https://www.nber.org/papers/w23618.pdf . Note that text states:

“We then assign parents income percentiles by ranking them based on this mean income measure relative to all other parents who have children in the same birth cohort. 20”

Note that they are comparing to parents who have children in the same birth cohort, not to families without children, like your census link above does. That said, I don’t see an especially large difference in thresholds between this parents with children in cohort sample group and the full population, as your comments might suggest. One possible explanation is a large portion of the parents who have children in the birth cohort do not fall into the “family” household grouping of the census linlk.

233

But blossom, we’re talking about kids who do qualify for acceptance to an elite college. And that means better than bump on a log ideas that everyone in their income cluster is how everyone lives. “Perspective” is one of the keywords looked for.

“The serious imbalance is in the top 5% which make up about half the students at “elite” colleges, despite being fewer than 6% of the student age population.” And, “This actually points to a high level of elitism at the “elites””

Can you possibly consider the fact that there are more wealthy is because more upper MC and wealthy apply to elites? (Ime, in droves.) And are themselves qualified? Why does it need to be only that the colleges are elitest in how they build a class? How is that proven?

Again, “elitest” does not simply mean ‘more wealthy, fewer not.’ It implies a sentiment that only the top wealth echelons are priority.

Data, imo, you’d need to compare where the droves of middle and lower class kids do apply, factoring for qualifications and the level of those colleges.

Imo, little about this idea elites are elitest is about raw numbers of kids out there. If there were no qualifications for an admit, other than applying, raw numbers “might” be more informative. But, kids still need to at least apply, which is free choice, not automatic.

There’s a reason elites actively recruit qualified low SES kids. And to suggest it’s pretense is its own misunderstanding.

234

I never said I thought the elite colleges were elitist. I’m pointing out that even an academically talented, off the charts intellectual kid from a middle class family from the public high school in Loveland, OH might not know any poor people or rich people IRL. And being a devoted fan of Edith Wharton, Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald (as this kid might well be) is STILL not going to be terribly helpful in 2020, navigating a campus with an abundance of- wait for it- not just kids from the top quintile (which I believe he’s MORE than capable of doing) but kids from the top 1%.

I understand why the elites recruit qualified low SES kids- I’ve been part of those efforts. In no way is it pretense, and it requires a LOT of explaining IRL to the terrific and smart “BWRKS” one interviews as to why the odds of admissions are so low. Numerator, meet Denominator. That doesn’t make it easier to show up on a college campus with your sneakers and “extra shoes” which happen to be flip-flops and dorm with another teenager who drops $500 on a pair of “going out” shoes just because she feels like it. Not casting aspersions on the talented kid with sneakers and flip flops at all… she’ll figure it out.

There wasn’t this kind of conspicuous consumption even among the really wealthy when I was in college. Plenty of rich kids, but they kept it quiet, or they continued to live modestly as they had growing up because their families thought outward displays of wealth were vulgar.

Ah, the 70’s. The War stunk, the nightly body count was terrifying, getting a bad draft number was catastrophic. But the lack of conspicuous consumption among the wealthy was actually quite wonderful.

235

Just noting, @blossom om, that only that first para was to you.

236

At the lower end of income, the difficulties in accessing services that help things like increase SAT scores, have “great ECs”, etc. By the time you get to the above median range, it’s the EFC. It’s simply cost prohibitive for most people who have income above median but below the top 5% to attend most of the “elite” colleges. But it goes beyond that. The same issues of cost and EFC make sure that the “elite” private high schools also have 50% of their students from the top 5% by income. These are the high schools from which almost half attend the most selective colleges. There are legacies and athletes who train is sports that are only played in high schools that serve the wealthy. There are legacy benefits, etc…

The entire admissions system of the “elite” colleges is set up in a manner which makes access for the kids from the wealthiest families much easier than it is for anybody else.

237

The issue about “wealthy” sports… It is for sure a real effect on admissions, but I still question the assumption that it is employed as a secretive, intentional way to keep the riff raff out.

The Ivy League has been doing crew, squash, lacrosse, etc for a hundred years, plus. They probably chose sports that their students played back in the day – wealthy students, primarily, no doubt, because that it who attended 100 years ago. Flash forward 100 years, the schools are still playing those sports, with a very long tradition of recruiting for them and enthusiasm about playing them. The sports aren’t being recruited for to keep poor people out. They are being recruited for because they are traditional for the schools to play. The potential student population has evolved to include more people who don’t have access to those sports. Yes, that means some populations have an advantage to be a recruited athletes in those sports. I get why people are upset by that. But what is the solution? Quit those sports? Quit recruiting? Neither seems realistic to me. Nor does it seem right to point at crew and say it is an implement of elitism intentionally wielded by the school.

Another question: Football. I don’t know the stats, but I doubt small “elitist” high schools are football powerhouses that feed into the Ivies. Their trend is toward an 8-man game or give up football all together because they can’t get enough students to play. So where do the Ivies recruit their football players from? It takes a lot more students to field a football team than a squash team, so I am wondering what impact football has on diversity at these schools.

238

I remember reading about how elite schools recruit their low income students from the same private schools, prep schools etc that they recruit all their other students. These are poor students lucky enough to get into these schools via scholarships. These students are such a tiny percentage of those living in poverty. And these students have resources beyond the wildest dreams of kids going to their neighborhood public.
So I would say the kid in the private school pipeline with the scholarship does have experiences and support to get in an elite school and thrive.
I’d say the poor kid at his local public - not so much.

239

Many of the colleges we tend to describe as “elite” on this forum are among the most affordable in the country for a large portion during much of the range you listed.

As an example, Harvard claims they are less expensive than state schools for ~90% of families in the US. Cost to parents by income as reported by Harvard’s new NPC at https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/net-price-calculator is below, assuming family of 4 with 1 kid heading off to college and Harvard’s definition of “typical assets.”

Median Income – Near $0 cost to parents
Top 20% Income – $8k cost to parents
Top 10% Income – $23k cost to parents
Top 5% Income – $67k cost to parents
Top 4%+ Income – Full Pay

Having such a large portion of students from the high income ranges contributes to “elite” colleges being able to have such generous financial aid for the minority of families that do not have top 20% income. The extremely large endowments and history also helps. The colleges that tend to have the worst SES distributions often have less generous FA than “elite” colleges.

240

The degree of recruiting advantage varies by a number of factors, including athletic conference. For example, The Ivy League is a Div I conference in most of the preppy, unpopular sports you listed. MIT, Caltech, Chicago, and most top ranked LACs compete in Div III, which usually coincides with far lesser degree of athletic preference than Div I.

If The Ivy League athletic conference wanted to reduce the degree athletic preference in less popular sports, there are many ways to do so besides “quitting those sports” or even dropping to Div III. For example, they might change conference recruiting limits for only the less popular sports. All Ivy League colleges would have the same limits.

The Ivy League colleges do have problems recruiting for football, so much so that they compete in Div I-AA instead of Div I-A and have special recruiting rules for football that allow for more lower AI stat admits than other sports. The Ivy League does not compete in the higher level Div I-A for football and doesn’t need to . I’m sure the Harvard-Yale game remains a big deal and popular, even though the Ivy League is not competing on the level of the dozens of ranked FBS teams. A similar principle could be applied for preppy, less popular sports.

Also note that football, basketball, soccer, and some other more popular team sports tend to have a decent SES distribution . They aren’t good examples of “wealthy sports.”