6 ms·

In their top 10 list the only school I have heard of is Tuf. Are these considered Elite colleges? Havard, Yale, Penn, MIT, Columbia, were not there.

FT_intern 10y ago
The fact that these colleges aren't elite actually hurts the article's argument. Also, the top colleges from that population that enrolls the highest percentage of low income students are much more prestigious than the top 1% income colleges.
- phlo 10y ago
  The mentioned schools are grouped into the 'Ivy plus' label and ranked as even more selective than the 'elite' group.
  - URSpider94 10y ago
    Right, they're so elite that the mainstream hasn't really heard of them. But, if you were to wander onto the executive floor at Goldman Sachs or a top law firm, I guarantee you'd see their banners hanging in the offices. These schools aren't elite because they attract the smartest students, they are elite because they attract the richest ones, who then have a leg up with their wealthy and well-placed alumni network.
    - lloyd-christmas 10y ago
      For some corroboration, I grew up as a 1%-er and I went to one of those schools with a student body of ~2k. I studied in London for a semester. My first week off the plane, there was a meet and greet with alums that were living there at the time. Before finishing my first drink I had an internship lined up at Credit Suisse for the summer. The school I went to was almost 25% Econ majors. Out of a class of ~500, we had 18 Math majors. We didn't even have a CS major available. The value wasn't in Linear Algebra, it was in people. I'm one of two people I know from school that work in STEM. All of my college buddies work in finance or politics. I still attend the meet and greets in NYC, and I end up as the center of attention because I DON'T work in finance (anymore). Funny enough, my brother also went to one of those schools. He's at GS.
  - tricolon 10y ago
    The mentioned schools are not "Ivy plus". > 12 “Ivy plus” universities (the Ivy League colleges, Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and the University of Chicago)
maxerickson 10y ago
With 20% of their enrollment being wealthy, they are de facto elite. They mostly have smaller enrollments though, and probably not a lot of research programs.
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gmarx 10y ago
I checked MIT (alma mater) and it was 173 greatly skewed towards the bottom 60%. Don't know if this is something to be proud of but there it is :)
- mturmon 10y ago
  A big endowment ($13.5B / class size = 940 => $14M/student) + the will to use it on scholarships. Kudos to them. I did undergrad at WashU, which in this ranking is the poster child for regressive admissions. WashU is opposite MIT in this respect: a medium-sized endowment ($6B / class size = 1400 => $4M/student) and no will to use it, at least not on scholarships. It was not that way back when I attended. The only way I can make sense of the graphs of diversity vs. time is that they are aggressively increasing tuition, recruiting among the wealthy, and erecting fancy buildings.
- davidf18 10y ago
  When Columbia turned down Richard Feynman because of the Jewish Quota, he went to MIT.
InitialLastName 10y ago
The worst ones on the top 10 list, in my experience, have very "upper class" reputations that aren't necessarily justified by their academic standards. For example, at Trinity College, only 43% of students were top 10% in high school, and the median SAT scores are in the 600-700 range per-test, while the estimated total annual cost is $68,940 [0]. Compare to nearby Yale, where 97% of students are in the top 10% and the middle range of SAT scores is 700-800 (i.e., the top 25% of SAT scores are perfect), while the annual cost is $68,950 [1]. I haven't looked at the rest, but I'm guessing (by repuation) that for a lot of those schools, "elite" is more about class and networks than academic ability. [0]: https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/trinity-college https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search... [1] https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/yale-university https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search...
- sotojuan 10y ago
  I went to a college like this, albeit not as extreme as Trinity. I didn't pay tuition though. Most colleges like Trinity and my alma mater make money off wealthy but average students and international students. Both pay full price most of the time.
jsin05 10y ago
The first top ten list is about the schools who have the biggest gap between the top 1% and the bottom 60% (the first top ten list is the only top ten list that contains tufts in the article). That list is ranked in order by the largest gap being in number one spot. If you are want to go to the school with the largest ratio of students who come from the top 1% then Washington University in St. Louis is the school to go to.
rayiner 10y ago
These are mostly liberal arts colleges. They're pretty selective (though several in the list are a notch or two less selective than Harvard/Yale), but have much less generous aid packages. The applicant pool is very self-selecting and unsurprisingly skews towards rich families. They're for people who want a liberal arts education in small-school setting, and are aiming at careers (law, politics) where the relevant people will have heard of those schools. (To be fair, if I had a trust fund I would've liked to go to one. You can be in a setting where you can get a lot of personalized attention, and the focus is in undergraduates than the big research programs that bring in the money.)
avn2109 10y ago
Also, the high-social-mobility list of schools is dominated by schools in high CoL areas, particularly NYC. Graduates from NYC schools (including graduates with non-wealthy backgrounds) disproportionately stay in NYC and make an NYC salary, which looks upper-middle-class by national standards but doesn't go very far when your rent is three grand. Therefore the claimed effect is at least somewhat spurious, being driven purely by geographic CoL variation. A better analysis would compensate for this, perhaps by normalizing by local CoL's.
harryh 10y ago
Most of them are on US News & World Report's List of top Liberal Arts colleges. Smaller schools with an undergraduate liberal education focus that tend to have less financial aid and attract richer kids. I wouldn't necessarily call them elite (especially those further down the list) but they are good schools. Colorado College - 24th Washington & Lee - 11th Colby - 12th Trinity - 38th Bucknell - 32nd Colgate - 12th Kenyon - 27th Middlebury - 4th http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
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FT_intern 10y ago

The fact that these colleges aren't elite actually hurts the article's argument. Also, the top colleges from that population that enrolls the highest percentage of low income students are much more prestigious than the top 1% income colleges.

phlo 10y ago
The mentioned schools are grouped into the 'Ivy plus' label and ranked as even more selective than the 'elite' group.
- URSpider94 10y ago
  Right, they're so elite that the mainstream hasn't really heard of them. But, if you were to wander onto the executive floor at Goldman Sachs or a top law firm, I guarantee you'd see their banners hanging in the offices. These schools aren't elite because they attract the smartest students, they are elite because they attract the richest ones, who then have a leg up with their wealthy and well-placed alumni network.
  - lloyd-christmas 10y ago
    For some corroboration, I grew up as a 1%-er and I went to one of those schools with a student body of ~2k. I studied in London for a semester. My first week off the plane, there was a meet and greet with alums that were living there at the time. Before finishing my first drink I had an internship lined up at Credit Suisse for the summer. The school I went to was almost 25% Econ majors. Out of a class of ~500, we had 18 Math majors. We didn't even have a CS major available. The value wasn't in Linear Algebra, it was in people. I'm one of two people I know from school that work in STEM. All of my college buddies work in finance or politics. I still attend the meet and greets in NYC, and I end up as the center of attention because I DON'T work in finance (anymore). Funny enough, my brother also went to one of those schools. He's at GS.
- tricolon 10y ago
  The mentioned schools are not "Ivy plus". > 12 “Ivy plus” universities (the Ivy League colleges, Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and the University of Chicago)

maxerickson 10y ago

With 20% of their enrollment being wealthy, they are de facto elite. They mostly have smaller enrollments though, and probably not a lot of research programs.

deleted 10y ago

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gmarx 10y ago

I checked MIT (alma mater) and it was 173 greatly skewed towards the bottom 60%. Don't know if this is something to be proud of but there it is :)

mturmon 10y ago
A big endowment ($13.5B / class size = 940 => $14M/student) + the will to use it on scholarships. Kudos to them. I did undergrad at WashU, which in this ranking is the poster child for regressive admissions. WashU is opposite MIT in this respect: a medium-sized endowment ($6B / class size = 1400 => $4M/student) and no will to use it, at least not on scholarships. It was not that way back when I attended. The only way I can make sense of the graphs of diversity vs. time is that they are aggressively increasing tuition, recruiting among the wealthy, and erecting fancy buildings.
davidf18 10y ago
When Columbia turned down Richard Feynman because of the Jewish Quota, he went to MIT.

InitialLastName 10y ago

The worst ones on the top 10 list, in my experience, have very "upper class" reputations that aren't necessarily justified by their academic standards. For example, at Trinity College, only 43% of students were top 10% in high school, and the median SAT scores are in the 600-700 range per-test, while the estimated total annual cost is $68,940 [0]. Compare to nearby Yale, where 97% of students are in the top 10% and the middle range of SAT scores is 700-800 (i.e., the top 25% of SAT scores are perfect), while the annual cost is $68,950 [1]. I haven't looked at the rest, but I'm guessing (by repuation) that for a lot of those schools, "elite" is more about class and networks than academic ability. [0]: https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/trinity-college https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search... [1] https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search/yale-university https://bigfuture.collegeboard.org/college-university-search...

sotojuan 10y ago
I went to a college like this, albeit not as extreme as Trinity. I didn't pay tuition though. Most colleges like Trinity and my alma mater make money off wealthy but average students and international students. Both pay full price most of the time.

jsin05 10y ago

The first top ten list is about the schools who have the biggest gap between the top 1% and the bottom 60% (the first top ten list is the only top ten list that contains tufts in the article). That list is ranked in order by the largest gap being in number one spot. If you are want to go to the school with the largest ratio of students who come from the top 1% then Washington University in St. Louis is the school to go to.

rayiner 10y ago

These are mostly liberal arts colleges. They're pretty selective (though several in the list are a notch or two less selective than Harvard/Yale), but have much less generous aid packages. The applicant pool is very self-selecting and unsurprisingly skews towards rich families. They're for people who want a liberal arts education in small-school setting, and are aiming at careers (law, politics) where the relevant people will have heard of those schools. (To be fair, if I had a trust fund I would've liked to go to one. You can be in a setting where you can get a lot of personalized attention, and the focus is in undergraduates than the big research programs that bring in the money.)

avn2109 10y ago

Also, the high-social-mobility list of schools is dominated by schools in high CoL areas, particularly NYC. Graduates from NYC schools (including graduates with non-wealthy backgrounds) disproportionately stay in NYC and make an NYC salary, which looks upper-middle-class by national standards but doesn't go very far when your rent is three grand. Therefore the claimed effect is at least somewhat spurious, being driven purely by geographic CoL variation. A better analysis would compensate for this, perhaps by normalizing by local CoL's.

harryh 10y ago

Most of them are on US News & World Report's List of top Liberal Arts colleges. Smaller schools with an undergraduate liberal education focus that tend to have less financial aid and attract richer kids. I wouldn't necessarily call them elite (especially those further down the list) but they are good schools. Colorado College - 24th Washington & Lee - 11th Colby - 12th Trinity - 38th Bucknell - 32nd Colgate - 12th Kenyon - 27th Middlebury - 4th http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-liberal-arts-colleges http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

deleted 10y ago

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