What If Instead of Taking the SAT You Got to Play a Video Game?

In statistical terms, this is the golden age of American higher education. More than 1 in 3 Americans has at least a bachelor’s degree, the most ever. Almost 70 percent of high school seniors graduating this spring will go to college in the fall, compared with about half during the mid-1970s.

The benefits of all that education, however, are highly uneven. The campuses of elite colleges remain disproportionately populated by the rich. At selective universities—ones that admit fewer than half of applicants—3 out of 4 students come from the richest quartile of families. According to Opportunity Insights, a research group led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, children from families in the top 1 percent of income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy-plus school—Ivy League plus Duke, MIT, Stanford, and the University of Chicago—than those from the bottom 20 percent.