You need money to make money.
Produced doesn't sound right. If anything, wealth attainment has declined with the rise of post-secondary schooling. Incomes have held stagnant. There is no sign of economic production.
"Those who come from wealthy families likely to choose amongst eight universities when selecting a university to attend" might be the most realistic way to frame this.
And about wealth attainment declining, we’re literally talking about the specific people that attained incredible amounts of wealth here… centimillionaires. Those are specifically what we’re counting. Your points about wealth attainment may hold true as an average of our whole population, but it’s specifically not the case for centimillionaires.
And both the way that I apparently unintentionally “framed” it and the way that you framed it are accurate. The people that attend these elite universities usually(not always) did come from backgrounds with a lot of “help” AND were elevated higher by attending these universities(whether that be from the connections they made or the better-than-average education). It doesn’t have to be an either/or.
What would you have expected exactly, and why?
For reference, there are around 4000 universities and colleges in the US.
I personally had no priors about this issue. If you had asked me, what % of US centimillionaires attended these 8 universities, I would have said, I have no idea. So I find it interesting that you already had an estimate.
But the way that I understood the original question was “what percentage of centimillionaires attended the 8 universities which produced the MOST centimillionaires”. When you pick the subset that produced the most of something out of a group, you should expect the subset to be over represented compared to the group. Sort of like the Pareto principle.
Also, part of the reason that I was surprised it was so low was that the numbers in the article were intentionally picked to invoke a reaction from the reader, and so if I’m coming from the angle of “let’s see how much wealth these fatcat elitists are hovering up!!” Then I’m a little surprised it’s only 35%.
The conclusion the article seems to be drawing is – regular people can't become centimillionaires because they can't get into Harvard. But is that really what this data shows? If someone pulled up the demographic of top country clubs, for example, they could similarly conclude that everyone who is a member of these clubs is rich, so if we just forced them to let in poor people we'd solve poverty.
The boring answer instead is – forget about Harvard and MIT and the rest of the top 10-20 "elite" schools and instead fund the state university system (funding still hasn't been restored since it went away nation-wide during the 2008 financial crisis), community colleges, trade schools and apprenticeship programs. All of these are a way more effective solution to getting a large number of people educated than constantly crying about Harvard's admission policies, but the latter is what drives online outrage and gets clicks.
Kids don't take out loans to join country clubs.
I'm not sure why you're talking about poverty, which is not the subject of the linked article.
" The next regular step was Harvard College. He was more than glad to go. For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known, had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.
Harvard College, as far as it educated at all, was a mild and liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to make. Its ideals were altogether different. The Unitarian clergy had given to the College a character of moderation, balance, judgment, restraint, what the French called mesure; excellent traits, which the College attained with singular success, so that its graduates could commonly be recognized by the stamp, but such a type of character rarely lent itself to autobiography. In effect, the school created a type but not a will. Four years of Harvard College, if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped."
The Education of Henry Adams*, Chapter IV, "Harvard College". (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2044/pg2044.txt
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Eye'm not vary smart, butts why knot me admitted to Harvard? Eye only gots a C- avrage in hi skool, butts if we going to bee equal, then us knot smart peeple must bee admitted at them universities, two.
Eye hate the discrimination against us. Maybee they need to take the same ratio of GPAs - only 5% A students, 25% B students and 60% C students and 10% hi skool dropouts so that Harvard and all of thems eleet skools "look like America."