Playing the Odds

From The Atlantic: If you hope to obtain a bachelor's degree by age twenty-four, your chances are roughly one in two if you come from a family with an annual income over $90,000; roughly one in four if your family's income falls between $61,000 and $90,000; and slightly better than one in ten if it is between $35,000 and $61,000. For high schoolers whose families make less than $35,000 a year the chances are around one in seventeen.

Also, a survey of 146 top colleges and found that only three percent of their students came from the bottom economic quartile of the U.S. population—whereas 74 percent came from the top one.