The Ivy-Plus Premium Is Narrower Than You Think

Let us be clear about what this is not.

This is not a case that twelve schools are the only ones worth attending. It is not an argument for chasing a name because the name sounds good at a dinner party. We spend a fair amount of our time talking families down from exactly that, and the students we work with who are happiest at twenty-five are not reliably the ones with the most recognizable diploma.

But the category is worth discussing honestly, because something unusual is going on in the numbers, and families sense it without being able to describe it. The usual responses are both bad. One is to pretend there is nothing there, which insults anyone who can read. The other is to treat it as destiny, which is worse and also wrong.

There is a third option, which is to look at what the research actually found. It is more interesting than either story, and it happens to be the most useful thing we can tell a seventeen-year-old.

The category has a real definition

"Ivy Plus" gets thrown around loosely enough that it usually means whatever the writer wants. It does have a precise definition, though, and it comes from economics rather than marketing.

Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman use Ivy-Plus to mean twelve institutions: the eight Ivies, plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago. That definition anchors a large body of work at Opportunity Insights, which matters here because it means the claims below are attached to a specific list of schools and a specific dataset, not to a vibe. People may be butthurt by this definition, but it is the one we are using. Please don't come at us saying we forgot Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, UVA, WashU, or Rice. We did not. All of these schools over a five year span could easily be substituted for one another in terms of ranking, prestige, network, and resources, because truth be told, they're all great institutions with plenty of history, and they all serve different specializations in their own way.

Their headline finding is the one worth sitting with:

Less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges, yet these twelve colleges account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. senators, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century.

Three quarters of the Supreme Court, from twelve schools, out of roughly four thousand degree-granting institutions in the country. Whatever you think that means, it is not nothing. The truth is that the Ivy-Plus premium is real and significant. Whether you believe this is an elitist take or not, the future leaders, innovators, and decision-makers in our society are disproportionately drawn from these institutions. These institutions know that they are as important to American History as the biggest and most famous corporations, because those very corporation's executives are largely affiliated with their alma maters, which guarantees an infinite cycle of support, donations, and new-graduate talent matriculating into their ranks.

It is a rate, not a headcount

Here is where almost everyone reasons badly, and it is worth being precise, because the wrong version of this claim is easy to disprove and gets our whole argument thrown out.

You will hear people say things like every major company is run by these people. That is false, and checkably so. Only about 11.8 percent of 2023 Fortune 100 CEOs attended an Ivy as undergraduates. Of the twenty largest companies by revenue, fourteen are run by someone who went to a public college. When Kittleman & Associates counted where every Fortune 500 CEO earned an undergraduate degree, the school at the top of the list was the University of Wisconsin, with fourteen — ahead of Harvard's twelve. That count is from 2018 and the names will have turned over since; the shape of it has not.

So if you count heads, the elite-college story falls apart immediately. Wisconsin beats Harvard.

But counting heads is the wrong operation, and any student who has taken a statistics class can say why. Wisconsin enrolls about 39,000 undergraduates. Harvard enrolls about 7,000. Producing fourteen CEOs out of the first population is a very different achievement from producing twelve out of the second.

Do the division, because it is the whole argument. Fourteen CEOs across 39,000 students is roughly 3.6 per ten thousand. Twelve across 7,000 is roughly 17. Harvard produces Fortune 500 CEOs at something like five times Wisconsin's rate per student while finishing second on the leaderboard. The numerators are similar. The denominators are not.

That is the entire disagreement, compressed. The people saying "elite schools dominate" and the people saying "most CEOs went to state schools" are both looking at real numbers and are both right about their own sentence. One is quoting a rate; the other is quoting a count. Almost every argument you will read about this topic is two people failing to notice they are computing different things.

The defensible claim is the rate. Under half a percent of Americans, over ten percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. Roughly a twentyfold overrepresentation. That is real, and it is large, and no amount of "but Wisconsin" makes it go away.

What the premium actually does

Now the part that matters for your kid, and the part almost nobody quotes, because it is less fun than the Supreme Court line.

Chetty's team did not stop at correlation. Rich kids go to these schools and rich kids do well; that tells you nothing on its own. They looked at what admission causes, using applicants who were essentially indistinguishable on paper but landed differently.

Compared with attending the average highly selective public flagship, attending an Ivy-Plus college increases a student's chance of reaching the top 1 percent of the earnings distribution by about 60 percent, nearly doubles the chance of attending an elite graduate school, and triples the chance of working at a prestigious firm.

And then, in the same body of work:

Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings.

Read those together, because separately each one is propaganda for a different side.

The premium is not a general uplift. It does not raise the floor, and it does not meaningfully move the middle. If you take a strong student and send them to a good flagship instead of an Ivy-Plus school, the research says their expected earnings come out roughly the same. The diploma is not paying a salary premium to the median graduate. That result has shown up repeatedly in this literature and it did not go away when better data arrived.

What the premium moves is the tail. It changes the probability of the rare outcome — top one percent income, the elite firm, the seat that leads to the other seats. It operates on the extreme end of the distribution and is close to silent everywhere else.

Which means the honest answer to "does it matter where I go" is: it depends entirely on which outcome you are asking about, and most families never specify. If the question is will my child have a good career and a comfortable life, the evidence says a strong public flagship gets them there and the Ivy-Plus school does not measurably improve it. If the question is will my child become a senator, that is a different question with a different answer, and you should notice that you asked it.

Most people do not want the tail. They think they want the tail because the tail is what gets written about. What they actually want is the median outcome, and the median outcome is broadly available.

The part that should bother you

One more finding, because leaving it out would make this a brochure.

In the same paper: students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as students with comparable SAT or ACT scores from the middle class.

Hold that phrase — comparable scores. The comparison already controls for the thing everyone assumes is doing the work.

Whatever is producing that gap, it is not academic ability, because ability is what was just held constant. So the twelve schools are not functioning as a pure sorting mechanism for talent. They are sorting on talent and on something else, and the something else correlates strongly with money.

This matters for how you read the CEO statistic. Part of that twentyfold overrepresentation is the school adding something. Part of it is the school admitting people who were already going to be overrepresented. The research separates these — that is the point of the causal design — and finds real effects on elite outcomes. But anyone who quotes the Supreme Court number as though it were purely a measure of what those schools do to a student is skipping the harder half of the paper.

What we actually tell students

Apply if the schools fit. They are extraordinary places with genuine concentrations of ambition, and being surrounded by people who assume large things are possible is a real input to a life. That is worth wanting, and we will help you compete for it.

Do not organize four years of high school around them. The admit rates make any individual outcome close to a coin flip weighted against you regardless of merit, and a plan whose success depends on a coin flip is not a plan. Build a list where the expected outcome is good, then let the tail be a bonus.

And do not let anyone — including us, including this post — tell you the flagship is a consolation prize. The best available evidence says that for the outcome you probably actually want, it is not one. That is not encouragement. That is the finding.

The reason we think this topic deserves a serious treatment is not that these schools are the only ones that matter. It is that the loose version of the claim is doing real damage to seventeen-year-olds, and the precise version turns out to be much calmer than the rumor. Under half a percent of Americans, ten percent of the Fortune 500, and almost no effect on what happens to a normal strong student either way. All three of those are true at once. Most of the anxiety in this process comes from families who have heard the first two and never the third.

If you want help building a list where the expected outcome is good and the tail is upside rather than the whole strategy, that is a good deal of what we specialize in. Apply to work with us via a free consultation.