Here is a Surprise

The reason that so many people want to go to the Ivy League schools, or Stanford, or any of the other schools has less to do with the quality of education than it does with the fact that the alumni are basically, "Made Men," in something not particularly different from the Mafia, or at least the Mafie according to Martin Scorsese.

After graduation, you have access to a whole network of privilege to give you a leg up on the rest of your life.

As such, it is little wonder that admissions is so competitive, at least until admissions are not at all competitive.

You see, when controlling for all other variables, test scores, grades, etc. it turns out that coming from a rich family more than doubles the likelihood of admission.

Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed résumés, and applied at a higher rate — but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.

The study — by Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard who study inequality — quantifies for the first time the extent to which being very rich is its own qualification in selective college admissions.

………

“What I conclude from this study is the Ivy League doesn’t have low-income students because it doesn’t want low-income students,” said Susan Dynarski, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has reviewed the data and was not involved in the study.

In effect, the study shows, these policies amounted to affirmative action for the children of the 1 percent, whose parents earn more than $611,000 a year. It comes as colleges are being forced to rethink their admissions processes after the Supreme Court ruling that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional.

But rich people affirmative action is completely legal.  In fact, it is mandatory.