As Harvard continues to battle claims that its undergraduate admissions process discriminates against Asian-American applicants, talk in a Boston courtroom this week focused on the socioeconomic status of students at the Ivy League institution. In short, lawyers for the plaintiff argued, wealthy students are overrepresented at Harvard, and it would be better to use socioeconomic criteria instead of race as a factor in admissions.
Detailed background on the lawsuit over the university’s race-conscious admissions policy, the case’s implications for selective colleges, and coverage of the trial as it unfolded, in a federal court in Boston.
“Socioeconomic diversity at Harvard is deeply lacking,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who testified on Monday on behalf of the plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions.
It’s true that Harvard’s student body is overwhelmingly affluent and is much less economically diverse than is the nation as a whole. But it’s broadly in line with its peer institutions in the Ivies, which all look roughly the same in terms of their students’ socioeconomic diversity.
According to data from Opportunity Insights, a Harvard-based research and policy institute focused on increasing economic mobility, here’s what we know about where Harvard stands:
Students from families that are in the top 20 percent of earners are well represented on the Harvard campus.
Sixty-seven percent of the university’s undergraduates come from families that made about $110,000 or more a year. That share rises to 72 percent at Princeton University, and is 62 percent — the lowest in the Ivy League — at Columbia University.
Harvard falls near the bottom among its Ivy peers in terms of the share of its students in the top 1 percent, but the range is a narrow one.
Fifteen percent of Harvard students come from families that made about $630,000 or more a year. Only two Ivy institutions — Columbia and Cornell Universities — have a smaller share of students from such families, at 13 percent and 10 percent, respectively. At the top of the list is Dartmouth College, with 21 percent. The chart below shows the proportion of students enrolled at each Ivy League institution who are from the top 1 percent.
Only about $50,000 separates the median annual family income for students at Harvard from their peers at other Ivy League institutions.
At Harvard, the median annual family income is $168,800. Columbia’s is the lowest, at $150,900, and Brown University’s is the highest, is $204,200.
The share of Harvard students from families in the bottom fifth in earnings is in the low single digits, just as it is throughout the Ivy League.
Harvard, at 4.5 percent, has the second-highest share of students whose families made about $20,000 or less a year. That’s roughly double the share at Yale University, whose 2.1 percent puts it at the bottom. The highest is at Columbia, which edged by Harvard with 5.1 percent.
Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.
