Low-income students have been underrepresented at many of the nation’s most selective public and private colleges since before spiral notebooks were invented.
That’s one of the key findings from a new working paper published on Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. In a major roundup of historical records, four researchers compiled data on 2.5 million students at 65 so-called elite colleges to create what they describe as the largest dataset on the socioeconomic backgrounds of college-goers in the United States, spanning the years between 1915 and 2013. (It’s worth remembering, as the paper notes, that many high-profile colleges have since embraced various strategies for helping low-income and first-generation students.)
The researchers also assessed the impact of two significant developments — the passage of the G.I. Bill and the rise of standardized admission exams — on the socioeconomic diversity of students at prominent colleges with the lowest acceptance rates over time.
Here are five things to know about the findings.
Though the share of low-income students in the college-going population increased significantly, their representation at highly selective colleges has remained low over time.
We know that many big-name colleges rejecting the vast majority of their applicants enroll an overwhelming number of students from high-income families. Back in 2017, this eye-popping research found that at about three dozen colleges, including five Ivy League institutions, more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the bottom 60 percent.
But that’s nothing new, according to the NBER paper. Students with parents from the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution, for instance, have made up about 5 percent of all students at such institutions over the last century. One exception: women’s colleges, where the representation of low-income students went from the lowest among highly selective colleges to the highest. And though the researchers found that public institutions have, on average, “also maintained a small and stagnant share” of low-income students, they were more socioeconomically diverse than private colleges.
The representation of upper-income students at highly selective colleges decreased after World War II but rebounded in the 1980s.
The proportion of students in the top 20 percent of the income distribution at private and public colleges declined significantly after World War II. By the early 1980s, they represented 50 percent of students at the private institutions in the sample (and 40 percent at the public ones). But the same decade brought a dramatic rebound to pre-World War II levels. And a key trend emerged: “Because the representation of lower-income students remained nearly constant throughout the period,” the researchers write, “the recent increase in the proportion of upper-income students has primarily occurred at the expense of middle-income students.”
Racial and geographic diversity increased as socioeconomic diversity stayed the same.
Since the 1960s, highly selective colleges have seen a significant increase in the racial and geographic diversity of their students even as the socioeconomic backgrounds of their student bodies have remained relatively stable. “These patterns,” the researchers write, “suggest that changes in racial and geographic diversity have all taken place within the middle and upper portions of the parental income distribution.”
This finding is important because it reveals a prominent fault line in the debate over race-conscious admissions policies, which the U.S. Supreme Court effectively banned last year. Some critics of such policies have long argued that they disproportionately benefited wealthy students while doing little to help poor ones.
The G.I. Bill opened doors to higher education — but not the gates of elite colleges.
The G.I. Bill, the familiar name for the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, provided returning World War II veterans with substantial educational benefits. But the proportion of low- and middle-income students attending highly selective colleges did not increase, the researchers found, perhaps because the law didn’t take aim at educational inequities, such as parental income or race: “Removing financial barriers to access was not enough to countervail pre-existing inequalities preventing” low-income students from enrolling.
Standardized tests were not equalizers.
Many colleges long embraced the notion that the SAT, which was first administered in 1926, can help them identify high-achieving students from various socioeconomic backgrounds. And some institutions that recently reinstated their testing requirements after a pandemic-era pause have reiterated that the policies would help them identify disadvantaged students. But recent data on the persistent gaps in standardized-test scores by parental income complicate the idea that the SAT and ACT are tools for enhancing equity.
In their analysis of the long-term effects of testing requirements, the researchers concluded that such policies had “no effects on the likelihood that lower- and middle-income students would enroll in elite private colleges.” And they also found “a relatively small and short-lived increase” in the share of lower-income students at elite public colleges.
“This persistence of the underrepresentation of lower income students at elite institutions is particularly striking given the large changes that have occurred in higher education over the last century,” the researchers conclude. “Our findings reveal that there is substantial continuity in the economic origins of students at elite colleges and that such persistence has in general been difficult to alter.”
