Consider two students applying to college with SAT scores of 1500. One comes from a family in the top 1% and the other comes from a middle-class family. Students from high-income families are more than twice as likely to attend Ivy+ universities as students from middle-class families. Students whose parents are business owners are far more likely to be admitted to top universities than students whose parents are teachers or bus drivers with the same high school test scores and grades.

If the top 1% of students were admitted to Ivy+ schools at the same rate as middle-class students with the same SAT or ACT scores, the share of top 1% students at America’s top universities would drop by almost half.

There are three factors that favor high-income enrollees. They are traditional priorities, non-academic evaluation, and athlete recruitment. Applicants from the top 1% of families whose parents attended an Ivy+ college (“legacy applicants”) are five times more likely to be admitted to an Ivy+ college than their equally qualified peers whose parents did not attend. Students from higher-income households also score higher on non-academic aspects of their applications. This is largely because they are more likely to attend a private high school where extracurriculars, college counseling, and other support for the application process are more available. Recruited athletes, who make up 10 to 15 percent of freshmen at top U.S. universities (which may be surprising to many outside the U.S.), are also heavily skewed toward higher-income families who can hire coaches and provide the support students need to excel in athletics.