Wealth Weighted: Colleges with the Most Students from Affluent Families
In 2017, Opportunity Insights, a group interested in social mobility, released a paper "Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility". The paper argues that colleges act as crucial agents for individuals from lower incomes, providing them a platform to improve their financial situations. This belief in the transformative power of colleges for economic mobility is a key motivator behind the inception of the Rank My College project.
It's important to note, however, that the rankings below do not focus on socio-economic mobility. Instead, I utilized the same data to satisfy my guilty curiosity about the lives of the ultra-wealthy. The goal was to identify colleges with the highest percentage of students from the top 0.1% of yearly earners.
Percentage of Student Body from the Top 0.1% of Yearly Earners
| # | Name | 0.1% |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Southern Methodist University | 3.62% |
| 2 | Princeton University | 3.61% |
| 3 | Yale University | 3.52% |
| 4 | Georgetown University | 3.38% |
| 5 | Dartmouth College | 3.35% |
| 6 | Brown University | 3.32% |
| 7 | Middlebury College | 3.14% |
| 8 | Harvard University | 3.12% |
| 9 | University Of Pennsylvania | 3.10% |
| 10 | Duke University | 3.10% |
| 11 | Trinity College of Hartford, CT | 2.92% |
| 12 | Amherst College | 2.91% |
| 13 | Vanderbilt University | 2.91% |
| 14 | Colgate University | 2.87% |
| 15 | Stanford University | 2.82% |
| 16 | Bowdoin College | 2.60% |
| 17 | Claremont Mckenna College | 2.54% |
| 18 | Colorado College | 2.45% |
| 19 | Lynn University | 2.44% |
| 20 | Pitzer College | 2.43% |
| 21 | Colby College | 2.43% |
| 22 | University Of Denver | 2.42% |
| 23 | Rollins College | 2.41% |
| 24 | Columbia University | 2.39% |
| 25 | Williams College | 2.31% |
The data is from Opportunity Insights (Online Data Table 3). The Rankings show the percentage of students, born between 1980 and 1991, whose families are in the top 0.1% income bracket.
