Linda and Roman first discovered their income was a school-admissions albatross when their daughter was 4 years old and they began applying to private kindergartens in Manhattan. The couple interviewed at one particular elite co-ed school, and at the end of the conversation, the admissions officer was blunt. “She said, ‘You seem really lovely, and your daughter seems lovely, but I just want to be straight with you: You’re in a dead zone,’” recalls Roman. She went on to explain that the couple didn’t make enough money to be considered potential donors and Olivia wasn’t a kid the school could lift out of poverty. Roman worked at a corporate-law firm but wasn’t an equity partner. “We were just barely scraping by, by Manhattan standards,” he says of the family’s low-six-figure income, which placed them in the top 10 percent nationally but in the bottom 20 percent of tuition-paying private-school parents in Manhattan, he estimates.
Olivia — a pseudonym, as are the names of the other families in this story — wound up at another prestigious prep school, where she ultimately became a stellar student and student-body president. As her senior year approached, she named Yale as one of her top college choices. That’s when Roman’s income reared its head again. The family wasn’t paranoid; her disadvantage was backed by data.
In July, Opportunity Insights, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization at Harvard University, compared parents’ tax filings and applicants’ test scores with admission and enrollment records at more than 100 selective colleges. When it came to the Ivy Plus schools (the plus being the University of Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford), the admissions graph didn’t show the straight diagonal line you might expect with the likelihood of admission increasing in lockstep with parents’ income. Instead, there was a dip revealing that chances of admission are lowest for children of the top 5 to 10 percent, who earn $158,200 to $222,400 a year. These applicants fare worse than both kids who are richer than them and kids who are poorer than them, all with similar test scores. At high schools with more than 40 Ivy Plus applicants per year — like Olivia’s private school — the admissions rate is lowest for the top 3 to 10 percent (earning $158,200 to $296,500), but within that, the microsegment of the top 4 to 5 percent (earning $222,400 to $251,100) fares the absolute worst. All of which is to say there’s a real disadvantage here, but it’s impacting kids who, as a group, have had most every advantage in life and will exit college with a critical financial safety net.
Olivia’s college counselor didn’t get into this data when she steered the teenager away from Yale and toward another East Coast school, one where both upper-middle-class and upper-class applicants appeared to have better odds. Instead, she said something like, “Yale is one of those schools where unless you’re racially diverse or unless you’re Über-wealthy or have a connection, don’t waste an early action on them,” recalls Roman.
The application process ended up being “exhausting and so stressful,” Linda says. Olivia and her parents toured more than 20 colleges, knowing admissions officers might love her, but also, as Linda puts it, “any school could decide, ‘Oh, by the way, we need a piccolo player for the marching band.’” Everyone understood which kid got bumped off the list to make room would depend in part on their parents’ income.
To her great relief, Olivia ultimately didn’t apply to the long list of schools she had crafted. She thrived at the college her admissions counselor suggested, where she was accepted early decision. She graduated recently and now calls it “the best decision I ever made, hands down — definitely my happy place.” No one can know if Olivia would have gotten into Yale. But, says Roman, “once we got some perspective, we didn’t feel aggrieved.”
Why are children who are wealthy, but not private-jet rich, at a disadvantage for admission to the most elite colleges? A significant piece of the puzzle is that one-percenter kids take up more than their fair share of seats.
Children of the top one percent, earning more than $611,000 a year, are significantly overrepresented in the Ivy League — more likely to attend selective private colleges than students from any other income bracket with comparable SAT and ACT scores. The Harvard researchers, led by economics professor Raj Chetty, have broken down the reasons into percentages. About 20 percent of the discrepancy is explained by high-income families applying to these schools at slightly higher rates than lower-income families do, and about 12 percent by more of them saying “yes” after being admitted. But most of the reason so many exorbitantly wealthy kids end up at Ivy Plus schools comes from a true advantage in admissions: Close to half of their edge is legacy status. Legacy students in the top one percent are five times more likely to be admitted than a non-legacy student, while legacy candidates poorer than the top 10 percent are only three times more likely to get into an elite school. And because legacy candidates are predominantly white, “alumni preference” policies put Asian students at a particular disadvantage, research shows — a problem that is likely to continue even in the post-affirmative-action era.
Roughly a quarter of the admissions advantage stems from athlete recruitment: Other studies reveal that athletes tend to hail from high-income families. Years of access to private lessons, club sports, better facilities, and niche teams (water polo, golf, squash, fencing) make a bigger difference than most people realize. The final 31 percent of the very-rich advantage comes from colleges judging these children to be stronger in nonacademic categories. That makes sense since they have greater access to extracurricular activities and leadership opportunities. And their applications have better spin in the form of more comprehensive and specific high-school counselor letters and teacher recommendations, says Jeff Selingo, the author of Who Gets in and Why.
Amanda has two kids in college and two in high school and lives in Westport, Connecticut. She sums up this research as follows: “As a white wealthy parent of a white child, I will tell you they have no fucking chance of getting in anywhere unless they have a legacy.” Amanda’s ex-husband works in finance, but she says there’s no “grandpa who wants to spend all their money on a building” waiting to contribute to the financial picture. Amanda’s daughter Marie attended private school, speaks Mandarin, had an unweighted GPA of 4.1, and earned a 1560 on the SAT. “Her extracurriculars would give away her identity, but they checked all the boxes,” Amanda says. Marie applied to 22 schools. “She’s brilliant, and she got in nowhere,” Amanda says. “She got into no decent school.” But of course, that’s an exaggeration; she was accepted to four of her safeties. Marie currently attends a university that did not make the U.S. News & World Report list of top-50 public schools. Amanda tells me, “She’s happy but often says, ‘Mom, I just wish I hadn’t studied. I would have gotten into the exact same schools.’” And Marie is probably right. Admissions scarcity is concentrated at the top of the rankings list; there are hundreds of four-year colleges that readily admit B and C students.
But many elite schools are laser focused on their stats. When standardized testing became optional during the pandemic, these colleges saw record-high applications, which led to the lowest-ever acceptance rates at a number of schools, including Brown and Dartmouth. And there are schools determined to drive that number even lower, using a strategy called “recruit to reject” or “recruit to deny”: The college sends emails (or messages through guidance software like Scoir and Naviance) to applicants unlikely to be admitted in order to get them to apply and boost the appearance of selectivity, says Selingo, who has a second book on college admissions in the works. Many elite schools also try to drive up their “yield rate,” the percentage of accepted students who actually enroll. And that’s why, for kids in the top 5 to 10 percent, “if you don’t apply early decision, which is binding, you’re probably not getting in,” Selingo says. “This income bracket tends to comparison-shop merit-aid packages or discounts in regular decision, and colleges know that, so they know their chance of yielding these kids is lower.” Another way of looking at it: A student who requires need-based financial aid clearly can’t pay, and a one percenter clearly can pay, but this income bracket is a wild card. Selingo says if they get “gapped,” meaning there’s a gap between what they can pay and what they’re being asked to pay (even with merit aid), the college will lose them. “That’s why these schools don’t love to admit these kids,” says Selingo.
The irony in all the hand-wringing is that these students don’t actually need Ivies to be successful. The Opportunity Insights team found that attending an Ivy Plus school, compared with a highly selective public university, increased students’ chances of reaching the very upper echelons of wealth and prestige, but there wasn’t much of an effect on average earnings or kids’ odds of becoming plain old rich. Plus, many prestigious schools are happy to have them, says Selingo. For example, at Williams and NYU, those in the top 10 percent do well, with the attendance dip coming instead for the top 15 percent. At Clemson, Johns Hopkins, Kenyon, Purdue, and Washington University in St. Louis, kids from the top 5 to 10 percent attend at rates similar to, if not higher than, the wealthiest applicants. These differing patterns stem largely from the interplay between prestige and money, Selingo says. Institutions that need money more — because, say, their endowments are small or their tuition revenues have been flat — don’t look askance at students whose parents can cover most or all of the price tag. Selingo says a 5 percenter’s chance may come down to one question: How many tuition-paying students does the school need? At Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and their ilk, the answer is “Not many.” But other colleges need as many Olivias — especially in the early-decision cycle — as they can get.
Which can make deciding where to apply and when to start feel like game theory. “School-list development is one of the most important elements of this process,” says Shirag Shemmassian, founder of Shemmassian Academic Consulting. His company, which he began in Los Angeles, provides guidance to clients as far-flung as India on building lists of up to 20 schools and resetting expectations. “If I told you there’s a 4 percent chance that you and I will have lunch today, and I said, ‘Do you think it’s pretty likely that you and I will have lunch today?,’ you’d say, ‘No, definitely not.’” But the same parents answering that question rationally are surprised and disappointed when their child isn’t accepted to a college with an overall acceptance rate under 5 percent, he says.
Amanda wishes Marie had applied early somewhere. “A lot of kids in her class who weren’t as smart got in because they went early decision,” she tells me. But Marie didn’t want to waste her ED on a school she wasn’t likely to get into, and she also didn’t want to apply to a safety school and then be stuck with it, Amanda says. She spent four years working unceasingly, passing up sleepovers, to earn a college choice, but Amanda says she didn’t really get one.
Shemmassian hears this sentiment a lot. “It feels unfair, almost like a student did their part, they upheld their end of the bargain, but the school didn’t uphold theirs,” he says. He sees panic and a rampant sense of discouragement among some clients. And something else: more parents signing up for support at the start of ninth grade. A four-year bundle with his company runs “upwards of $50,000,” he says, and can include advising on which classes a student should take and which extracurricular activities will most impress admissions committees. (In other words, if you’re worried about being displaced by the piccolo player, become the piccolo player.)
Jillian Ivy provides college guidance to students applying to Ivy Plus schools, and not just the ones who “have houses in Aspen.” The international business she started 15 years ago, after she stopped interviewing for Harvard as an alum, is based in New York City. Five years ago, Ivy worked with students directly. She still does, but “it’s like the helicopter-parent thing,” she says. “The parents just call me constantly.” Many of them know that more students, at every income level, apply from the tristate area than from many other locations, and their heightened anxiety has produced “a horrible, horrible trend,” Ivy says. This past year, she has seen “upper-middle-class parents who are sacrificing everything to move their child in their junior year to a different state so they can apply to college from, like, Ohio.” The pandemic increased the feasibility of remote work. “That’s when people started to fool the system,” Ivy explains. “It’s like, ‘We can work from anywhere, so why don’t we go sit in West Palm Beach and have our kid apply from Florida instead of New Jersey?’ And suddenly they have an advantage. Will it work? It might, until admissions catches on.”
Joseph, a top 5 percenter and the father of two daughters in California, has resisted the urge to hire a private college-guidance counselor or uproot his family. The product designer says he and his wife, who works in human resources for a hospital system, are committed to the regular, non-binding decision cycle for their daughter this year because it’s the only way to compare merit-aid offers. When his elder daughter was accepted to Columbia University and Boston College a few years back, he managed to negotiate a larger aid package at the former. He’s nervous but feels somewhat reassured by the fact that the family is Black, which should give his daughter an admissions edge despite the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against affirmative action. After centuries of privilege flowing in the opposite direction, “it’s about time,” Joseph says. But he’s not confident about her chances. It’s more like “a mix of resigned and freaked out.”
Amanda is more bitter than resigned. Paying over $50,000 a year for a private high school seemed as if it would be enough. Now, she says, “it’s bullshit. This fucking price tag for nothing.” Amanda says of Marie, “She may be happy, she may be flourishing, but is she reaching her potential? Absolutely not.”
With two more children applying in the next few years, “I’m petrified about what’s in store for them,” she says. “My youngest daughter is so stressed out over it. I’ve just given up. I’m like, ‘Go for the easiest.’” She’s referring to schools that admit more students from her family’s income bracket, but in the next breath, she mentions a financial-services firm that is hiring only Harvard grads. “Where you go does matter,” she says. So she and her ex-husband have engaged an independent consultant for about $10,000 a year to help with their third child’s admissions process. “Because of your color, because of your financial status, you’ve got to stand out,” she says.
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