Researchers surveyed 2.5 million students of elite colleges and confirmed most Ivy Leaguers come from wealthy families

College attendance in the U.S. has increased from under 10% to over 60% in the last century. Yet, according to a new paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, despite the change in attendance rates, most students at elite universities come from wealthy families.

The researchers assembled a dataset of records from 2.5 million students at 65 elite colleges over the past hundred years. They found in the 1920s, 8% of college students were from families at the bottom 20% of the income distribution. A hundred years later, 13% of male college students and 20% of female college students were from the bottom 20% of the income distribution.

However, for Harvard University and Yale University, only 5% of students came from the bottom 20% of the income distribution, and this has not changed over the past hundred years. This pattern also held true for the other Ivy League universities, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and Duke University.

However, public universities have seen an increase. The University of California, Berkeley, for example, increased its number of low-income students from 3% in the 1920s to 10% by the early 2000s.

The researchers did find that upper-income student enrollment at elite colleges decreased after World War II (WWII), but has surged again since the 1980s. Before WWII, 70% of the student body at private elite institutions (and 55% at public elite institutions) were from families in the top 20% of the income distribution. After WWII, this fell to 50% for private institutions and 40% for public. However, during the 1980s, this bounced back to pre-WWII levels and has stayed there ever since.

The researchers pointed out that since the proportion of low-income students at Ivy League schools has stayed the same, this increase comes at the expense of middle-income student enrollment.

Finally, while economic diversity has not increased, racial and geographic diversity has increased. Before the 1960s, the student body was almost entirely white. Since the Civil Rights Moment, Black student enrollment has increased to about 7% of the student body population and held steady. Interestingly, for elite public schools, Black enrollment has dropped since the early 2000s, but it has held steady at elite private schools.

In addition, international student enrollment has increased from under 5% before the 1950s to about 15% in private colleges. Meanwhile, prior to the 1950s, only 30% of students were from outside their college’s geographic region, but this has since increased to about 60%.

In conclusion, the researchers wrote, “Two major policy changes in the history of American higher education, namely the G.I. Bill after World War II and the introduction of standardized tests for admissions, had little success in increasing the representation of lower- and middle-income students at elite colleges.”