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.

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.

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.

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

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

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.)