The Scope of the Issue: Inequality by the Numbers
Education is often seen as a vital engine of social mobility that levels the playing field for low-income students—enabling all Americans to pursue the elusive American Dream. In particular, attending one of the nation’s elite colleges has a lifelong impact: access to positions of leadership; gateways to lucrative careers; and opportunities to maximize one’s human, social, and economic capital (Pallais & Turner, 2006). However, despite promises to increase socioeconomic diversity on campus, low-income students remain extremely underrepresented at the nation’s top universities (Bloomberg, 2014). Elite institutions include those universities with the greatest resources, highest selectivity, and top-tier annual rankings. 
Aimee Yan
Among top colleges and universities, only six percent of students are classified as low-income (Bloomberg, 2014). At Princeton and Harvard, the nation’s two most highly ranked universities, the number of students coming from families earning less than $30,000 shrinks to five percent (Pallais & Turner, 2006). Amid commitments to increase diversity and promises to admit more poor students, top colleges educate roughly the same percentage of low-income students as they did a generation ago (Pérez-Peña 2014). Federal surveys of selective colleges conducted from the 1990s to 2012 measuring the enrollment of poor students found virtually no change. If action is not taken, the persistent underrepresentation of low-income students at the nation’s most well-resourced universities is likely to worsen following the COVID-19 crisis, which has shrunk endowments and financial aid funds in universities across the U.S. (Lee, 2013).
The problem becomes even more apparent when comparing the rates of attendance at elite institutions between students from high and low-income families. At the country’s most competitive colleges, 70 percent of students come from families within incomes in the top 25 percent (Bloomberg, 2014). Among the “Ivy-Plus” colleges (which includes the eight Ivy League colleges, the University of Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and Duke), more students come from families in the top 1% of the income distribution (14.5 percent) than the entire bottom half of the income distribution (13.5 percent) (Chetty et al., 2017). While roughly one in four of the richest students in America attend an elite college, less than one-half of one percent of children from the bottom fifth of American families do the same; in fact, less than half attend any college at all (Aisch et al., 2017). Children whose parents are in the top one percent of the income distribution are an astounding 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile (Chetty et al., 2017).
Broader Implications: Why Underrepresentation Matters
The exclusion of low-income students from elite colleges results in a tremendous loss of talent that translates into social and economic losses at both the individual and societal level (Allen & Engberg, 2011). High-achieving, low-income students are the least represented at top colleges despite the fact that they have the most to gain from attending them. Top-tier universities can serve as “gateways” to positions of leadership and lucrative careers that provide important opportunities for intergenerational mobility and yield high returns for low-income students (Pallais & Turner, 2006). Access to top colleges has a lifelong impact on economic mobility: students who attend these schools have earnings that are 25 percent higher than those who attend less selective colleges—amounting to a difference of $450,000 over the course of a lifetime (Bloomberg, 2014). Further, the underrepresentation of poor students in elite universities translates to their exclusion in leadership positions post-college. The importance of top colleges as causal channels to influential positions is evidenced by the fact that 10 percent of Fortune 500 executives in 2001 attended an Ivy League college and 10 percent of all publicly traded firms in the U.S. have at least one senior manager from Harvard (Zimmerman, 2018). For these reasons, getting low-income students into elite campuses is seen as a critical engine of social mobility with important implications on intergenerational mobility (Pérez-Peña, 2014).
