Why Elite-College Admissions Matter
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Attendance at an elite college increases a student’s chances of joining America’s most elite ranks, according to a new study. I chatted with my colleague Annie Lowrey, who reported on this new research yesterday, about how to diversify the student bodies of America’s wealthiest schools—and, by extension, the whole of elite America.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- The American evangelical Church is in crisis. There’s only one way out.
- How Trumpism differs from fascism
- Why Elon killed the bird
A Propulsive Quality
A new what might seem to be an obvious correlation: Attending an elite school ups a person’s chances of ascending the ranks of elite society. The study, conducted by Raj Chetty of Harvard, David Deming of Harvard, and John Friedman of Brown University, looked at waitlisted students’ outcomes and showed that compared with attending one of America’s best public colleges, attending a member of what’s known as the “Ivy Plus” group—the Ivies plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago—increases a student’s chances of reaching the top of the earnings distribution at age 33 by 60 percent.
