New paper on determinants of college admissions…

[Anonymous]

It’s interesting to me how some people for the life of them cannot separate academic achievement from earning power. One does not equal the other.

Most of Americas top 1% are people who own successful regional businesses like beverage distributors or home service companies or car dealerships. I live in Texas, and when I think of people who I know or know of who are in this position, they went to the state schools and are even, gasp, SEC school grads.

They aren’t at banks or other institutions that are essentially sucking up money from the bottom half of America to enrich themselves, which the majority of the high paying jobs that people are chasing from these top schools and which parents here bewilderingly seem to be wanting for their kids, are doing.

And as a poster above mentions, in contrast, there are plenty of grads from these top schools in public service careers, etc making relative peanuts (and still having great lives which I know is shocking.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s interesting to me how some people for the life of them cannot separate academic achievement from earning power. One does not equal the other.

Most of Americas top 1% are people who own successful regional businesses like beverage distributors or home service companies or car dealerships. I live in Texas, and when I think of people who I know or know of who are in this position, they went to the state schools and are even, gasp, SEC school grads.

They aren’t at banks or other institutions that are essentially sucking up money from the bottom half of America to enrich themselves, which the majority of the high paying jobs that people are chasing from these top schools and which parents here bewilderingly seem to be wanting for their kids, are doing.

And as a poster above mentions, in contrast, there are plenty of grads from these top schools in public service careers, etc making relative peanuts (and still having great lives which I know is shocking.)

Sorry..most of the top 1% aren’t in fact in those businesses.

Let’s just take car dealerships..there are 1400 individual dealerships in TX but only around 75 groups own those 1400 dealerships, and many have been in the same family for 50+ years (or are corporate owned like a CarMax).

Of the 25 richest in Texas, over half are in banking/finance, a bunch are in tech, several are hedge funds tied to commodities, many directly involved in energy, etc. Yes, the largest owner of auto dealers in TX is also in the group.

Most of America’s top 1% are in tech, banking, PE, real estate, hedge funds, etc.

[Anonymous]

The kids of legacies include a disproportionate number of people in academia, too. Often their parents are also academics. Although low earning by the authors’ metric, these kids tend to be really well prepared for college both academically and socially and contribute a lot to campus (many grew up in various college towns and campuses and taking college classes in high school).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s interesting to me how some people for the life of them cannot separate academic achievement from earning power. One does not equal the other.

Most of Americas top 1% are people who own successful regional businesses like beverage distributors or home service companies or car dealerships. I live in Texas, and when I think of people who I know or know of who are in this position, they went to the state schools and are even, gasp, SEC school grads.

They aren’t at banks or other institutions that are essentially sucking up money from the bottom half of America to enrich themselves, which the majority of the high paying jobs that people are chasing from these top schools and which parents here bewilderingly seem to be wanting for their kids, are doing.

And as a poster above mentions, in contrast, there are plenty of grads from these top schools in public service careers, etc making relative peanuts (and still having great lives which I know is shocking.)

Sorry..most of the top 1% aren’t in fact in those businesses.

Let’s just take car dealerships..there are 1400 individual dealerships in TX but only around 75 groups own those 1400 dealerships, and many have been in the same family for 50+ years (or are corporate owned like a CarMax).

Of the 25 richest in Texas, over half are in banking/finance, a bunch are in tech, several are hedge funds tied to commodities, many directly involved in energy, etc. Yes, the largest owner of auto dealers in TX is also in the group.

Most of America’s top 1% are in tech, banking, PE, real estate, hedge funds, etc.

You realize that the top 1% is much deeper than the top 25 actual people? And also a much more realistic goal for people.


https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/stealthy-wealthy-entrepreneurs-one-percenters-boring-businesses/91190916

https://www.wsj.com/business/making-money-wealth-boring-8cc6c2cd?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/opinion/sunday/rich-happiness-big-data.html

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~yagan/Capitalists.pdf


An excerpt from the NYT piece:

The study didn’t tell us about the small number of well-known tech and shopping billionaires but instead about the more than 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year. The researchers found that the typical rich American is, in their words, the owner of a “regional business,” such as an “auto dealer” or a “beverage distributor.”

This shocked me. Over the past four years, in the course of doing research for a book about how insights buried in big data sets can help people make decisions, I read thousands of academic studies. It is rare that I read a sentence that changes how I view the world. This was one of them. I hadn’t thought of owning an auto dealership as a path to getting rich; I didn’t even know what a beverage distribution company was.

[Anonymous]

I wonder how much of this result is driven by the way they group the colleges.

They grouped colleges like this:
* “Ivy Plus”: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Brown, Penn, Duke, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth
* “Other selective privates”: Northwestern, Hopkins, Georgetown, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, CMU, WUSL, Emory, CalTech, NYU, USC
* “Flagships”: UCLA, Cal, Michigan, UT Austin, Florida, UGA, UNC, UVA, Ohio State

What would happen if you reorganized those lists?
* If you broke out HYPSM as their own group, would the rest of Group A still show different results from Group B?
* Would Group B improve if you removed the big urban schools (NYU and USC), which are obviously distinct from the others in many ways?
* How much would Group C improve if you replaced Ohio State with Georgia Tech?
* If you broke out the elite tech schools (MIT, CalTech, CMU, Ga. Tech) as their own group, would that group do better or worse than HYPS? Would it do better than Chicago?

The way the paper is presented seems designed to convince you that an anthropology major from Columbia is destined to earn more money than a premed from Hopkins or an aerospace engineer from Georgia Tech, but I’m dubious.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:…to highly selective colleges (8 ivies, Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Duke)

https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf

The analysis shows that highest income applicants (top 1 percent) have an admission advantage over the average applicant due to: 1) legacy admissions; 2) athletic recruitment; 3) non-academic factors (e.g., private school extracurriculars). In fact, legacy admissions explain about half of the gap between acceptance rates between highest income and average applicants.

Also, attending IvyPlus colleges does improve earnings and leadership prospects after colleges. The authors do a nice job of identifying the causal effect of IvyPlus attendance.

Putting these findings together, the implication is that more socioeconomic diversity can be achieved without sacrificing academic quality by eliminating legacy admissions and athletic recruitment.

Already done in many states

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wonder how much of this result is driven by the way they group the colleges.

They grouped colleges like this:
* “Ivy Plus”: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Brown, Penn, Duke, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth
* “Other selective privates”: Northwestern, Hopkins, Georgetown, Rice, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, CMU, WUSL, Emory, CalTech, NYU, USC
* “Flagships”: UCLA, Cal, Michigan, UT Austin, Florida, UGA, UNC, UVA, Ohio State

What would happen if you reorganized those lists?
* If you broke out HYPSM as their own group, would the rest of Group A still show different results from Group B?
* Would Group B improve if you removed the big urban schools (NYU and USC), which are obviously distinct from the others in many ways?
* How much would Group C improve if you replaced Ohio State with Georgia Tech?
* If you broke out the elite tech schools (MIT, CalTech, CMU, Ga. Tech) as their own group, would that group do better or worse than HYPS? Would it do better than Chicago?

The way the paper is presented seems designed to convince you that an anthropology major from Columbia is destined to earn more money than a premed from Hopkins or an aerospace engineer from Georgia Tech, but I’m dubious.

And why are some colleges even listed/included in study given already passed laws cannot do legacy:

California: In 2024, California passed a law banning private colleges from giving preference to applicants with alumni or donor connections.
Colorado: In 2021, Colorado was the first state to ban legacy preferences for all public colleges and universities.
Illinois: This state has outlawed the practice for public universities.
Maryland: This state became the first to pass a ban affecting both private and public colleges.
Virginia: In 2024, a bipartisan law passed that banned legacy and donor preference at all public colleges and universities.

[Anonymous]

67% of Princeton students receive need based financial aid meaning they are MC at the most. Seems like plenty of socioeconomic diversity. In comparison, a school such as Wake Forest only has 27%.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:67% of Princeton students receive need based financial aid meaning they are MC at the most. Seems like plenty of socioeconomic diversity. In comparison, a school such as Wake Forest only has 27%.

They provide aid up to $350k in annual income. MC is generally like $80k of HHI.

[Anonymous]

We use anonymized admissions data from several colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study the determinants and causal effects of attending Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago). Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation

I haven't gotten around to reading the paper, so perhaps this is answered in the methods, but the first few sentences here appear to conflate admission with enrollment, and I'm skeptical that colleges would release data on applicant pools vs admitted vs enrolled sufficient to make these calculations.

All top colleges have enrollment management consultants that use algorithms and/or have their own in-house mathematical modeling. The extent to which wealth (which is not the same as income alone) is a factor is known by enrollment management consulting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:…to highly selective colleges (8 ivies, Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Duke)

https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf

The analysis shows that highest income applicants (top 1 percent) have an admission advantage over the average applicant due to: 1) legacy admissions; 2) athletic recruitment; 3) non-academic factors (e.g., private school extracurriculars). In fact, legacy admissions explain about half of the gap between acceptance rates between highest income and average applicants.

Also, attending IvyPlus colleges does improve earnings and leadership prospects after colleges. The authors do a nice job of identifying the causal effect of IvyPlus attendance.

Putting these findings together, the implication is that more socioeconomic diversity can be achieved without sacrificing academic quality by eliminating legacy admissions and athletic recruitment.

Actually it does not say that. Might want to actually spend some time with it before you type.

OP here. I have actually read the paper. What I wrote above is my summary of the findings (rather than a direct quotation). And yes, I am qualified to summarize an economics paper

If that is the case then your summary is incorrect. And I too read the paper and am qualified to evaluate the results.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:…to highly selective colleges (8 ivies, Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Duke)

https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf

The analysis shows that highest income applicants (top 1 percent) have an admission advantage over the average applicant due to: 1) legacy admissions; 2) athletic recruitment; 3) non-academic factors (e.g., private school extracurriculars). In fact, legacy admissions explain about half of the gap between acceptance rates between highest income and average applicants.

Also, attending IvyPlus colleges does improve earnings and leadership prospects after colleges. The authors do a nice job of identifying the causal effect of IvyPlus attendance.

Putting these findings together, the implication is that more socioeconomic diversity can be achieved without sacrificing academic quality by eliminating legacy admissions and athletic recruitment.

Actually it does not say that. Might want to actually spend some time with it before you type.

OP here. I have actually read the paper. What I wrote above is my summary of the findings (rather than a direct quotation). And yes, I am qualified to summarize an economics paper

If that is the case then your summary is incorrect. And I too read the paper and am qualified to evaluate the results.

Just curious: what are your qualifications?

[Anonymous]

Why exactly is the goal..for some …social mobility flipping, ie downward mobility for wealthy white boys and maybe girls, and then upward social mobility for other groups? Or is the goal here to make universities 80% Asian with a small portion of seats open to the rest of the country?

Legacy donors are an income stream for universities. Do you really expect legacy families to keep giving money so other kids can attend in place of their kid? If your kid was crushed that he/she didn’t get into the family legacy school despite having top stats and achieving everything they could within their agency as a teenager, would you happily write a big fat check so a kid who was less wealthy but not necessarily more qualified could attend? I don’t think so.

[Anonymous]

The Conclusion is on page 45.

“Attending Ivy plus over a state flagship substantially increases students’ chance of achieving upper-tail success both in terms of earnings and non-monetary outcomes. The magnitudes of the treatment effects are substantial: we estimate that attending an Ivy-plus college instead of a flagship public increases mean incomes by $101,000…”

People will cite short term post college outcomes (salary after graduation, 5 year, etc)- but not over lifetime when it really pays off.

[Anonymous]

We show that under the identification assumption that different college admission committees’ assessments of a candidate’s underlying merit (i.e., the component that predicts long-term outcomes) are positively correlated with each other, comparisons of students who are admitted vs. rejected from the waitlist can be used to identify the causal effect of admission for marginal applicants.

Using this design, we find that being admitted from the waitlist to an Ivy-Plus college increases students’ chances of achieving early career upper-tail success on both monetary and non-monetary dimensions. The causal effects of admission to an Ivy-Plus college are much larger for students with weaker fallback options– e.g., whose colleges in their home state channel fewer students to the top 1% after college. Exploiting this heterogeneity in treatment effects, we estimate that the marginal student who is admitted to and attends an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public is about 50% more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution at age 33, nearly twice as likely to attend a highly-ranked graduate school, and 2.5 times as likely to work at a prestigious firm.

Seems like the assumptions about admission from the waitlist are not warranted. Most waitlists are need-aware. Generally, waitlist acceptance is related to institutional priorities. I think they are reading way too much into that.

--my kid was admitted to an Ivy-Plus off the waitlist this year. full pay, high stats. Was not admitted off the waitlist at other, lower-ranked schools. Not being admitted off the waitlist at the other schools does not imply anything about the merit of his app.

They are trying to do too much in this "study".

College-Specific Analysis Sample. When studying admissions and matriculation at specific colleges Section 3.2), admissions decisions (Section 3.3), and the causal effects of colleges on outcomes (Section 4), we focus on the subset of Ivy-Plus and flagship public colleges for which we have internal application and admissions data. In these analyses, we define the analysis sample as all permanent residents or citizens in the college-specific dataset who submitted a first-year undergraduate application to the college over the years for which we have data who (1) can be linked to the tax data based on their SSNs or ITINs and (2) can be linked to parents in the tax data.

Full pay students often do not include SSNs in the application because they are not applying for need-based aid. My kids did not.