Every once in a while, an older research paper pops back into the discourse unexpectedly and invites another look. A 2023 NBER working paper analyzing the determinants and effects of attending America’s most elite colleges has been recently updated, and has gained attention anew as many on the political right continue to call into the question the influence that such institutions have in America, amid a broader discussion of the value of college.
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) heavyweights Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman used five different sources to build their dataset: federal income tax records on parents and children’s incomes from 1996–2021; 1098-T tax forms on college attendance from 1999–2015; Pell grant records from the Department of Education’s National Student Loan Data System from 1999–2013; standardized test score data from the College Board every year from 2001–2005 and every other year from 2007–2015, as well as ACT scores from 2001–2015; and admissions records for undergraduate first-year students spanning subsets of years from 1998–2015 from a list of private and public colleges. That list has two parts. What’s sometimes termed “Ivy-Plus” consists of the eight Ivy League schools plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago. All colleges in the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) systems, as well as all four-year public institutions in Texas, were labeled as a “flagship public colleges” comparison group. These data sources were linked together, and all analyses were conducted using the linked, anonymized, individual-level dataset.
The headline finding was that children from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution were more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-income families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap was due to higher admission rates for students from high-income families with test scores comparable to their lower-income peers; the remaining third was due to differences in rates of application and matriculation among the two groups. By comparison, children from the highest-income families demonstrated no such admissions advantage at the flagship public colleges. To be fair, flagship public colleges also admit a larger share of students from top 1 percent families than from middle-income families, but the gap there is driven almost entirely by disparities in application rates rather than anything to do with admissions.
Chetty and colleagues also used their longitudinal data to show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of a flagship public college on average boosted students’ chances of reaching the top 1 percent of the earnings distribution by 50 percent, nearly doubled their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and almost tripled their chances of working for a prestigious employer. Interestingly, “prestigious” is defined here as an employer that disproportionately employs students from Ivy-Plus colleges, which is somewhat circular and does raise a question or two about the findings. More on this below.
The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges was driven by three factors, two of them pretty obvious: preferences for admitting children of alumni and athletic recruitment (think: “rich kid” sports like crew, squash, etc.). The third—weighting placed on non-academic credentials like “extracurricular activities, leadership traits, etc.”—is one sure to raise hackles among proponents of meritocracy. In fact, all three factors are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas academic credentials such as SAT/ACT scores are highly predictive of post-college success. As Chetty and team lay it out, students of equal academic ability are being shut out of elite colleges because such ability is systematically subsumed beneath highly gameable non-academic admissions factors. And that’s a problem, not only for higher education, but also for our society at large.
To illustrate the problem, the researchers tweaked their formula to reflect a putative admissions policy without the advantage that arises from the highly-weighted non-academic factors enjoyed by students from high-income families. This change reduced the percentage of admitted students from the highest income category from 15.8 percent of the actual admitted student body to 11.1 percent of the hypothetical admitted student body. The places thus vacated could be readily filled by lower-income students with a high likelihood of college achievement based on their SAT/ACT scores. Assuming a similar distribution of outcomes (graduate school attendance, employment, income level, etc.) for the new, more-diverse cohort, the many post-college advantages of an Ivy-Plus degree are projected to be distributed beyond top income families where they are currently concentrated.
Fast forward to today: Would a change like this—leading to the diversification of society’s future leaders, per the report’s title—be enough to turn down the heated rhetoric aimed at these elite institutions? The current administration in Washington seems to be on a mission to find out, although it is hedging its bets by also trying to change the academic culture, which could easily impact the Ivy-Plus “advantage” for whomever might earn it—although not in the way this report’s authors envision it.
SOURCE: Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges,” National Bureau of Economic Research (first published July 2023; updated August 2025).
