According to this study published by the Century Foundation, minority students only make up about 12 percent of the student body at elite universities. (The approximate percentile of minority college students at all colleges at the time of the study was 28 percent). Further, only 3 percent of the student body at such colleges came from the bottom quarter of the socionomic scale. A meager 16 percent came from the bottom half.
These elite universities comprise the top 146 schools in the country. They include such luminaries as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Michigan, etc. The study points out that students who attend such universities are more likely to graduate, have their choice of grad schools, and have access to higher paying jobs after graduation.
The report points out that this lack of diversity often comes from the institution's admissions policy. These universities do not recruit students for diversity. Their student body for the most part is made up of white middle- and upper-class students. A University of Michigan poll of the 2002 incoming freshman class showed that 51 percent of their students came from families making $100,000 or more. Only 25 percent of their student body came from families making $50,000 or less. The university talking head interviewed for this article claimed this was mostly due to a family's lack of knowledge of financial aid procedures. (They did have a points based policy that granted extra points to a potential applicant if they were a minority or low income student, but this was overturned by the Supreme Court.)
An even more interesting tidbit further down in this article is where one of the authors of the TCF study gives statistics on who does get into the elite universities: 10 percent are admitted because of race, 15 percent of white students are admitted because of an alumni relative (the dreaded "legacy" admission), 5 percent are granted admission because of parental donations, and 5 percent are admitted to play sports.
A few of those interviewed for the article said that there is an institutional bias against lower-income students. I certainly think that this is true. I was a low-income student, many years ago. While I didn't go to U-M (I dislike the university and Ann Arbor too), I did manage to go to a good public university and graduate. I had to work hard, and there were times that I thought I wouldn't make it through. But for every person like me, there are three or four others who fail, often because they've started with a dead weight around their necks.
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