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The most active thread yesterday was titled, "dont be in the 60th to 99th percentile in income" and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. The original poster linked to an article in the New York Times that discussed an analysis of college admissions data. According to that analysis, the wealthiest top 0.1% of applicants had a huge admissions advantage, the poorest applicants had a slight advantage, while those in the middle had a disadvantage. The article actually paints a somewhat more complex picture. As one poster, quoting the article, explained, "colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings". While the article mostly focuses on how this system perpetuates the "intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity", posters in the thread were more concerned by the disadvantages suffered by those in the middle that the article illustrated. As the original poster noted, that is where most DCUM posters are represented. Most of the college forum posters have always seemed to believe that college admissions were unfair and that they are particularly unfair when it comes to the forum's posters. So, for many posters, this article simply justifies what they already believed. Some posters ignored the advantages enjoyed by the wealthy and, instead, focused on the slight advantages received by the poorest applicants. As one poster explicitly put it, "there is a clear bias towards the lower half of the income bracket and again sthe upper half (half, not the 0.1%)" But, as another poster pointed out, unlike other groups, poor students are not overrepresented in student bodies. My understanding after reading the article is that there just are not that many poor applicants who meet the admissions requirements. Those that do have a great chance of admission, but there still simply aren't many of them. Ironically, that was almost exactly the same argument made by one of the apologists for the ultra-wealthy who wrote, "who really cares about the very small number of ultra rich?" Like the original poster, most of those participating in this thread are most interested in discussing the disadvantages suffered by those with middle incomes. Some posters even parse the data to show that differences even among varying strata of the middle income segment. But, basically, this is the other side of the coin used to explain the poor and ultra-wealthy advantages. While there are few members of those categories, there are a lot of applicants in the middle and, as such, the competition is fierce. The bottom line described in the article is that there is an entire system of "affirmative action for the wealthy" that includes legacy admissions, admissions of friends and family of large donors, athletic admissions, and advantages provided to private school students that give the ultra wealthy an extreme advantage. As illustrated, an applicant in the 99.9th income percentile would have a roughly 3 times more likelihood of being accepted by an elite college as a student in the 90th percentile.