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<p>It’s fairly easy to estimate some of this. From a school’s Common Data Set or from U.S. News you can determine what percentage of the students are full-pays. At Columbia, for example, 48.5% of the students are full-pays. Colleges differ a bit as to the household income level at which they cut off need-based FA, but at the wealthiest schools it’s generally in the $180K to $200K range. So roughly half the students at Columbia come from the top 5% to 6% highest-income households. (A few full-pays may come from families with somewhat less income but much larger assets)</p>
<p>At the other end of the income scale, the Chronicle of Higher Education puts out data on the percentage of Pell Grant recipients at each school, who would represent students from the bottom end of the income scale. As far as the colleges are concerned, Pell Grants are free money, so each school that gives any need-based aid is going to make sure each student eligible for a Pell Grant gets one (unless they fail to complete their FAFSA or FA application on time). At Columbia, 15.1% of undergrads are on Pell Grants. This is fairly high for an elite private university; at Yale it’s 8.9%, at Harvard 6.5%. Most elite private universities hover around 10%, give or take a few. Pell Grant recipients generally come from families earning $40,000 or less–that is, roughly the bottom 25% of household income.</p>
<p>So if half the students come from the top 5% highest-income household, and another 15% come from the lowest quartile, that leaves 35% of the student body to be filled by kids from households with incomes ranging from the 25th to the 95th percentile. That’s the 70% of households that most of us would consider “middle class” (though many in the top 5% would insist they’re “middle class,” too, or maybe “upper middle class,” and some in the upper range of the Pell Grant-eligible households would also claim to be “middle class”). From that 70% in the middle, Columbia gets 35% of its students. So I’d say the middle class is underrepresented. But notice it’s not because low-income, high-need kids are overrepresented: Pell Grant kids representing the lowest 25% of household income make up only 15% of Columbia’s student body, so proportionally, they’re almost as underrepresented as the 70% in the middle. The squeeze is really coming from the high end, from the 5% most affluent who make up roughly half the student body.</p>
<p>Of course, the high-end kids are going to say they’re just more qualified, and by some measures it’s hard to argue with that. As a group they went to better schools, likely took a more demanding HS curriculum (because it was available to them), had better SAT prep (in addition to which, SAT scores correlate positively with income, to the point some have suggested the SAT is a better predictor of household income than of college success), and engaged in the kinds of ECs that elite private colleges and universities prize (the child of an autoworker from Flint or Toledo is just not very likely to be recruited to Columbia to play squash, or tennis, or golf, or crew, or fencing, or lacrosse; not that it could never happen, but it’s just not very likely). Legacies will also be skewed toward the higher end of the income scale, because face it, Columbia grads tend to be pretty smart, well educated, well connected people who, on the whole, tend to be pretty successful in their careers. Then, of course, there’s the genetic factor, but I don’t even want to go there because that opens up another can or worms. </p>
<p>As for how many applications Columbia gets from people in the middle 70% of household income, I have no idea, but whatever the number, I’d be willing to bet the admit rate is significantly lower for that group than for the 5% at the high end of the income scale. Of course, colleges don’t want us to know, so we probably never will.</p>