Higher Education
Reading guide
About this project
Think of this site as an interactive textbook that unlocks years of economic policy research from The Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
The 3-tiered layered model allows you to explore each topic at varying levels of detail and depth, giving you a tangible understanding of how policy can impact you, your community, and our country as a whole.
Section
The Inequality Machine
The wealthiest students attend the most prestigious schools
The richest colleges are attended disproportionately by the wealthiest students. At the twelve “Ivy Plus” colleges (the Ivy League plus MIT, Stanford, Duke, and University of Chicago), there are more students from the top 1 percent of the family income distribution than from the bottom half.
Even among high achievers, income predicts college attendance
Adding to this is the fact that not everyone attends college. Young people from wealthy households are much more likely to attend college in the first place. Income predicts college attendance and college selectivity, even among high achievers.
Not all colleges can spend like Harvard
Resource allocation across U.S. colleges and universities is highly unequal. Selective private colleges spend far more money than the public colleges and universities attended by most students. Ivy league colleges spend upwards of $100k per student per year, compared to about $10k per student per year at community colleges. So, the wealthiest students go to schools that spend the most money on the college experience.
Adding it all up – resource distribution in higher education
Colleges vary widely in the amount that they spend on the student experience, and richer colleges enroll wealthier students. We can add these two things together to calculate the average amount of money spent on higher education for students in all parts of the family income distribution. This exercise allows us to paint a complete picture of the unequal distribution of resources in U.S. colleges and universities.
Money Matters
Huge disparities emerge when you put it all together. Median spending is zero for young people in the bottom 60 percent of family income, because more than half of them do not attend college. Over the course of four years, students from the top 20 percent receive about $23k in education spending. These numbers grow rapidly at the very top. For the top 5 percent, it’s $36k, and it’s $50k for the top 1 percent.
More spending buys you higher quality faculty, smaller classes, and more student support. Lots of high-quality research shows that these things strongly predict graduation rates and later life earnings.
This is nothing at all like K-12 schools. While disparities exist in elementary and secondary education, they are much lower. Everyone is entitled to attend K-12 schools for free, and almost every state has a system of redistributing public taxpayer money to equalize school spending across rich and poor districts. Compared to grade school, higher education really is an inequality machine.