At its heart, the Ivy Coach blog seeks to dispel major misconceptions about the elite college admissions process. And one of the biggest misconceptions that just does not seem to go away is that Ivy league schools and other highly selective colleges only seek to admit students of high socioeconomic status. This is simply not the case! Anyone who has read an elite university press release on an incoming class will tell you that the percentage of low-income and first-generation students in the cohort is often front and center! Not only do students of low socioeconomic status contribute to the campus diversity, they also reflect well on an institution’s public reputation for inclusion, accessibility, and admissions competitiveness.

However, this is not to say that students from low-income and first-generation backgrounds are as represented on elite campuses as their wealthy counterparts. Ivy Coach has long decried the unfair practices — the legacy admissions boost, the athletic recruitment pipeline, etc. — which contribute to the overwhelming overrepresentation of rich, and often white, students on elite college campuses. In fact, the cumulative effect of these factors led The New York Times to publish a scathing article entitled “Study of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qualification.”

Lower Income Students Are Prized by Elite Admissions Officers, But These Schools Can Still Do Better

It’s absolutely true that elite college admissions officers relish the opportunity to admit an academically-ambitious student from a working class background. The problem lies with the fact that not enough students from low-income backgrounds apply to these schools in the first place and certainly not enough to counteract the edge given to wealthy applicants. But this is not the fault of disadvantaged high schoolers. It is incumbent upon highly selective colleges and universities to increase recruitment efforts in lower-income communities. Don’t just flaunt these students who make it in, actively try to open the gates to them!

This revolution in recruitment could take many forms. To start, elite universities should sever the pipelines filtering in an inordinate amount of privileged students from elite prep and boarding schools. Next, they should carry out more events and programming directed at recruiting low-income students. It is crucial that they get the message out that low-income students actually have a fair shot at an elite education — they need only apply! Dramatic change begins at the level of cultural norms. These schools are in a unique position to shape and improve these norms for the sake of all of the incredibly promising first-generation low-income students who slip through the cracks each year.

Finally, these schools should enshrine the admissions boost given to development cases whilst phasing out the legacy and recruited athlete admissions boosts. How will protecting the most privileged of candidates help FGLI students? We’re glad you asked! Major (and we mean major) university benefactors make robust financial aid programs possible through their philanthropy. Development cases only count for a small number of slots in an admitted class, but ensure each school’s accessibility to FGLI students. There is no sense in gambling away this accessibility for the sake of a completely fair admissions landscape. On the other hand, most legacy students and recruited athletes do not come with major financial windfalls when admitted. As such, they can be thrown to the wolves! There is no justification for admitting lesser students who bring nothing to their respective campuses at the expense of highly talented FGLI students!

Middle Class Students Are Squeezed Out of Elite Colleges and Universities

Quite interestingly, admission to the Ivy League is the least likely, when controlled for SAT test scores, for middle class students, a.k.a. those whose parents have incomes between the 65th and 90th income distribution percentiles. These students are too rich to receive low-income consideration, and too poor to benefit from the admission boosts preserved for the privileged. 

They probably need some financial aid in order to attend elite schools, but will not earn an Ivy League university the good publicity of admitting a lower-income student who needs full financial aid. To make matters worse, they don’t reflect well in data compilations of institutional economic diversity. The overall effect is that Ivy League student bodies become stratified between a cluster of the richest students in the world and a cluster of the poorest, an effect that has been replicated in applicant pools across the nation.