At Top Colleges, 100 Years of Affluence

The proportion of low- and middle-income students at highly selective colleges was the same in 2013 as it was 1923, despite a massive expansion in broad college access. During that century, the college-going rate for Americans skyrocketed from 10 percent to more than 60 percent. But no historical development, from the GI Bill to the introduction of standardized testing, meaningfully changed the socioeconomic makeup of elite institutions. That’s the groundbreaking finding of a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research, conducted over the course of five years using a century of income and enrollment data from 65 of the most selective public and private universities in the country.