Less than 1 percent of college students attend Ivy League colleges and equally selective schools, like Stanford and Duke. But these schools have an outsize influence on American life. Practically every Supreme Court justice of the last 40 years, 25 percent of the U.S. Senate, and one in eight Fortune 500 CEOs went to these schools. A new study on their admissions programs finds that they are heavily biased toward children from rich families. For applicants with the same SAT score, kids from families in the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in compared to the average student. A coauthor on that paper, Harvard economist David Deming, talks to Derek about what his landmark study tells us about college, fairness, and the American dream.
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In the following excerpt, Derek and David Deming talk about why high-income students have a better chance of getting into prestigious universities—and discuss the evidence that an Ivy League degree actually does help after graduation.
Derek Thompson: So before we get to the actual findings of this paper, I would love to know where you got this data. Because I was thinking about this as a journalist. If my editor told me, “Derek, we need you to figure out whether (a) elite colleges discriminate against the poor. And (b) to figure out what exactly the benefit of even being admitted to a college like Harvard or Yale actually is by connecting the marginal admissions of students to their outcomes and the labor force after they graduate.” I’d be like, “That is a really, really hard question to answer.” You have answered it in this paper. How did you get this data?
David Deming: Well, Derek, it was a long and winding road, as you might imagine. It really involved a lot of, I mean, I’d say for the better part of a year, maybe even two years, my coauthors and I traveled the country convincing college presidents and admissions officers and other people in universities to give us the keys to the kingdom. And I think it wasn’t easy. We weren’t always sure we were able to do it. But I think fundamentally, a lot of these folks are mission driven. They really are in the higher-ed business because they believe in what they’re doing and they want to be part of improving American higher education. And so I think they wanted to be a part of the study, and we convinced them that we would handle their data securely. And we worked at it, and that’s how we got it. And then we had to link it to IRS records, which took a while. And then during COVID, we weren’t allowed to use the data, and so on and so forth.
So it was definitely a long and winding road. It took five, maybe six years to do the whole thing, but hopefully it was worth the effort. And I’m so grateful to not only my coauthors and the research team, but also all of our CLIMB partners. The CLIMB Initiative, which is the organization we started to do this research, has almost 400 colleges and universities as a part of it. They enroll about 3.5 million students a year. It’s about 15 percent of the entire undergraduate population in the U.S. This study focuses on so-called Ivy Plus colleges, so it’s the Ivy League plus Stanford, Duke, Chicago, and MIT. But I think the study has important implications for the rest of higher education, and we plan to do more studies with the rest of our partners. So it’s definitely been a team effort.
Thompson: So you went around begging?
Deming: Basically, yes.
Thompson: Which is frankly how I get a lot of my data. I just go around begging people who have access to the data. I’m like, “Hey, please, I could really use this.” And then they say, “No, we won’t give it to you.” And I keep begging.
Tell me what question you wanted this paper to answer, and tell me what the first main finding of this paper was.
Deming: So the main finding of the paper—there’s really two main findings of the paper. The first one is the one that has received the most coverage, which is who gets into one of these elite schools, and why? And that is where we show the important styled-as-fact that was on the front page of the article in The New York Times. That said basically, four students who have essentially the same SAT or ACT scores—so look at two applicants who have the same test scores—if an applicant is from a family from the top 1 percent of the income distribution, they’re more than twice as likely to be admitted as an applicant, again, with the same test scores, who’s from a middle-class family. And in the paper, we dig into why that is. What is the source of that advantage?
We show it’s mostly admissions. It’s not about differences in application or yield—let’s say, because some people don’t need financial aid and some do. It’s not that. It’s really admissions. And it’s sort of three components that explain all of it. And we can dig into those later.
It’s legacies and recruited athletes. And both of those groups, again, it’s not just those preferences, it’s that those students tend to be from higher-income families. And so giving a tip to recruited athletes and giving a tip to legacies tends to lead to having more wealthy students in your college.
And then the third factor is that students from high-income families tended, again, among those who have the same SAT and ACT scores, the students from high-income families tend to have very high ratings on things like extracurriculars and leadership, nonacademic factors that gave them the nod over families from middle- or low-income backgrounds.
And so that’s the first part of the paper that’s received the most attention. The thing I’m most excited about in the paper and the thing that I was most surprised by is the second part, which is the outcome of: Is this Ivy League college admissions blood sport really worth it? And I expected, based on past research and maybe some of my own prior beliefs, to be honest, the answer would be no, not really. But the answer is yes, it actually is really worth it. Students who are admitted off the wait list to one of these schools, compared to students who are rejected off the wait list, are about 60 percent more likely to be in the top 1 percent of income at age 33 themselves. They’re twice as likely to be at a top 10 graduate school, and they’re about three times as likely to work for a prestigious firm in a variety of sectors. Think about top law firms, top consulting firms, research hospitals, prestigious universities, and so on. So it really does seem to make a difference, and that was surprising.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: David Deming
Producer: Devon Manze
Subscribe: Spotify
