A new report found little change in the socioeconomic makeup of elite colleges over the last century.
The proportion of low- and middle-income students at highly selective colleges was the same in 2013 as it was 1923, despite a massive expansion in broad college access.
During that century, the college-going rate for Americans skyrocketed from 10 percent to more than 60 percent. But no historical development, from the GI Bill to the introduction of standardized testing, meaningfully changed the socioeconomic makeup of elite institutions.
That’s the groundbreaking finding of a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, conducted over the course of five years using a century of income and enrollment data from 65 of the most selective public and private universities in the country.
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In the early 1900s, around 8 percent of the overall college population came from the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution; by the 2010s that had greatly improved, with 13 percent of male college students and 20 percent of female students coming from the bottom 20 percent. But according to the study, no such change occurred at highly selective colleges.
“Students with parents from the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution have consistently made up approximately 5 percent of the student bodies at these institutions throughout the last century,” the study reads.
It’s nothing new that wealthy colleges with low admission rates enroll a vastly disproportionate number of wealthy students; a 2017 report found that many of the colleges featured in the NBER study enrolled more students from the top 1 percent of wealth earners than from the bottom 60 percent.
Ran Abramitzky, an economics professor at Stanford University and one of the study’s authors, said the research upends the traditional story of elite higher education’s slow but steady “democratization.” He noted that highly selective institutions have made substantial efforts to encourage low- and middle-income enrollment—especially in the past decade, a period the study does not cover.
But the conclusion of his research is hard to misinterpret: America’s top colleges are no less elitist now than they were during the Roaring Twenties.
While socioeconomic diversity stayed constant, racial and geographic diversity increased significantly over the same 100 years, the study found, with an unsurprising spike in Black representation after the civil rights movement.
The study includes data from 30 selective public flagships, all eight Ivy League universities, eight historically women’s colleges and 15 liberal arts colleges, along with Stanford, Duke, MIT and the University of Chicago.
To compile what the study describes as “the most comprehensive dataset of students’ socioeconomic backgrounds,” Abramitzky and a team of researchers visited university archives and combed through a century’s worth of yearbooks, digitizing their contents and matching the information of 2.5 million students with U.S. Census data to ascertain their family income.