So from what I have seen in terms of parental SES distributions, the student populations at wealthy LACs don’t look that much different from the undergrad populations at wealthy private research universities. Both are skewed way more toward more educated and wealthy families, particularly at the highest end, as compared to the general college-bound population, or even the in-state population at top flagships (the OOS population at top publics, perhaps unsurprisingly, sometimes looks a lot more like a private college distribution). But the less reliant a college’s undergrad operating budget is on net tuition, the more representation it will tend to have among working-class to middle-middle class families, relative to less financially well-resourced colleges of an otherwise similar type.
Unfortunately, to my knowledge there are not great controlled studies on outcomes by parental SES after college for each college. We know parental SES still does matter, but I don’t know if there is any really good source for carefully evaluating colleges against each other in that working-class to middle-middle-class range (there are some crude attempts, but I think too flawed to really be usable).
Still, at least at the more selective private colleges, enough kids are getting upper-middle class outcomes that the raw numbers seem promising. Not necessarily definitively so, but when comparing the total incoming distributions to what we know of the total distributions for graduates, it does seem to me likely that a lot of the working-class to middle-middle class incoming students are ending up doing better for themselves.
So personally, I would be cautious about the implied suggestion above that only a few elite privates offer similar social mobility options to in-state publics. Specifically, IF you can get admitted, and IF they are as affordable, or indeed more affordable, as compared to your in-state options, I am not at all convinced taking such an offer is a bad idea.
I do believe non-wealthy kids should be very cautious about taking out a lot of extra loans in pursuit of such colleges–any of them, in fact, even the biggest names. Like the difference with the biggest names appears to be mostly concentrated in just a few tail outcome cases, so most families sacrificing a lot financially for those names may never get the additional “return” they used to justify that higher “investment”.
But if you can get a great aid package–need, merit, or a combination–from a private, including less famous privates, I would not automatically assume taking such an offer isn’t in your interests.
