The American media has been flooded with news about Donald Trump’s omnipotence within the Republican Party and his impressive lead ahead of the primaries.
At the same time also, the other opponent is Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate. But it does not matter so much who will sit in the comfortable chair of the oval office, as what remains unchanged in the great democratic country, is the “oligarchic” perception in the selection of people who occupy leadership positions.
This is confirmed by the research of American scientists at Harvard, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges”, which reveals that leadership positions in the US are disproportionately held by graduates of 12 elite private universities.
These include the eight Ivy League colleges, the University of Chicago, Duke, MIT and Stanford. In short, we are talking about Ivy-Plus.
Less than 1% of American students may attend these 12 institutions, but Ivy-Plus students represent 15% of those in the top 0.1% of the income distribution, 1/4 of US Senators, half of all Rhodes Scholars and 3/4 of the Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half century!
Are your parents rich candidate?
However, apart from the possibility that the graduates of these institutions have to occupy such high positions, what is even more impressive is that the institutions that produce these leaders operate with minimal merit-based criteria in the admission of students.
Students who attend Ivy-Plus come from high-income families: only 10% of students who score excellently in the entrance exams (to go from High School to Universities) and come from a middle economic class attend one of the above colleges.
The picture is very different for the children of Americans who are in the nation’s wealthiest 1%, as they are much, much more likely to be admitted. The percentage jumps to 40% of the students studying in the first class institutions.
These top-ranked colleges are more than twice as likely to admit a student from a high-income family compared to a low- or middle-income family, while having the same entrance exam scores.
The overrepresentation of students from high-income families at Ivy-Plus colleges is largely due to differences in admissions rates, rather than differences in application or enrollment among those admitted.
At the same time, on the contrary, public flagship universities – eg state universities, such as Missouri, California, etc. – do not rely on parents’ income to evaluate a student’s admission to the institution.
Tradition first, ratings second
The higher admissions rates for students from high-income families can be attributed to three factors, according to the research: preferences by private administrations for children of older graduates, as if it were an inherited right, higher “non-academic” scores and their athletic occupations.
According to the research, the biggest factor contributing to the unfair over-representation of rich children in elitist theaters is the institution of… tradition. That is, they have much more hope that the children of previous graduates of these colleges will be accepted.
They are 5 times more likely to be accepted to one of the 12 colleges than peers with comparable credentials whose parents, however, were not fortunate enough to attend the same institution.
Criteria for… “personal acquaintances”
The next biggest—scandalous?—factor contributing to the high-income admissions advantage is that it’s not academic grades, but extracurricular activities, leadership ability, and personal qualities that weigh heavily on evaluations!
Strikingly, children of the rich tend to receive significantly higher non-academic “ratings” from admissions committees. These differences in non-academic scores result primarily from differences between high schools: among students with similar entrance exam scores, those attending private high schools tend to receive much higher non-academic scores (but similar academic assessments) than students attending the public secondary schools.
Because children from high-income families are more likely to attend private high schools, these differences in nonacademic factors between high schools (which may result from differences in access to resources such as extracurricular activities and guidance counselors) lead to an admissions advantage for children high income families.
They find work more easily
Of course, attending one of these institutions opens wide the doors to the job market at well-known companies, compared to a student attending a public university. The chances are tripled! Thus, the children of the richest 1% of Americans will find work more easily than those who need it most.
Acceptance from the waitlist is often driven by random factors—such as whether one plays an instrument to fill a spot in the college orchestra—rather than by systematic student characteristics that predict success in later life.
Waitlist admission to an Ivy-Plus college greatly increases a student’s chances of success after college. Compared to attending highly selective flagship public universities, students who attend Ivy-Plus are 60% more likely to earn in the top 1% richest, twice as likely to attend a top 10 graduate program, and three times more likely more likely to work for major employers in medicine, research, law, finance and other fields.
Attending an Ivy-Plus college dramatically changes the trajectory of a child’s life, giving them a much greater chance of reaching leadership positions.
These large impacts underscore the large role that Ivy-Plus colleges play in shaping society’s leaders, who can then have a large influence on the lives of many others, the researchers note with concern, asking these private institutions to reverse course to offer the socioeconomic diversity of US leaders.
