The Hockey Stick: How Attendance at Elite Colleges Surges at the Top of the Income Distribution
All rates are test-score-adjusted: they compare students with identical standardized test scores. A value of 1.0 means income has no effect.
Key finding: At highly selective private colleges, students from the top 0.1% of family income attend at nearly 4× the expected rate—even after controlling for test scores. Highly selective publics are the only tier where the richest students are under-represented.
Source: Chetty, Deming & Friedman (2023)