Duly Noted

Leadership positions in the United States are held disproportionately
by graduates of a group of 12 highly selective, private “Ivy-Plus”
colleges—the eight colleges in the Ivy League, the University
of Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford. Less than one percent of
Americans attend these 12 colleges, yet they account for 13.4% of
those in the top 0.1% of the income distribution, a quarter of U.S.
Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme
Court justices appointed in the last half-century (Figure 1).
Furthermore, the students who attend Ivy-Plus institutions
disproportionately come from high-income backgrounds
themselves: just 10% of students scoring at the 99th percentile on
the SAT/ACT from middle-class families attend an Ivy-Plus college,
compared with 40% of similarly high-scoring students from families
in the top 1 percent of the income distribution (Figure 2).