It’s Not Just About the Rich Kids

Sometimes, Americans just want to be told what they already know. One really good example of this is the coverage of a big <a href="https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31492/w31492.pdf" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">study</a> of elite college admissions by the economists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman. The three researchers looked at admissions policies for “Ivy-Plus” colleges (the Ivy League plus a few other elite schools like Duke and MIT). They essentially asked two questions: <ul> <li>Who gets into elite colleges?</li> <li>And how much does it matter whether a student gets into an elite college?</li> </ul> Almost all of the coverage of the study has focused on the first question, and most of it focused on the least surprising part of the answer to the first question — that rich kids have a better chance of admission to a fancy college than other kids. Take the New York Times’ <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/24/upshot/ivy-league-elite-college-admissions.html" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">big story</a> on the subject, entitled “Study of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qualification.” The article focuses almost entirely on the economists’ findings that rich kids have a better chance of getting into elite colleges than everybody else. The graph that accompanies it, showing that students from the top 0.1% of the income distribution were twice as likely to get into elite colleges as the average student, has gotten a lot of play on the internet. The article has over 2,700 comments; it is clearly a hot-button issue, especially after the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. <a href="https://worldhistory.medium.com/its-not-just-about-the-rich-kids-6fcf47c23ac0">Visit Now</a>