Looking at the graphs in the article, the "Ivy plus" line is at about 70% for the "top 5% parental income" bucket on the "top 20% income" graph. I will claim t

Looking at the graphs in the article, the "Ivy plus" line is at about 70% for the "top 5% parental income" bucket on the "top 20% income" graph. I will claim that every single student in that bucket (a fairly small number of people, when you stop and count them, adding up to well less than 5% of the population of the US) in fact had perfectly reasonable opportunity to end up in the top 20% of the income distribution. And just to be clear, from looking at page 17 of the original paper at <http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper.pdf> http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper..., "top 20% of the income distribution" in this case means an individual income of $58,000/year by age 34. The 30% that did not end up there almost certainly prioritized other things over income. But that does not take away the fact that they had the opportunity. So it might be more correct to say that opportunity is the probability distribution over outcomes, conditional on goals. That statement I might be willing to accept.