Jake AndersJul 24, 2023

Getting into a very top US university has big consequences: "attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%"

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31492

Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

NBER
Show threadJake AndersJul 24, 2023

Given that, we'd better hope it's a really fair admissions process, right? Nope!

"Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores."

Show threadJake Anders

"Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families".

Those differences right at the top? Driven by (among other things) preferences to children of alumni. To someone not in the US, that's just insane.

Jul 24, 2023 at 3:13pmWeb