By D.D. Guttenplan
LONDON — While it may be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, it has long been thought easier for the rich man’s son or daughter to get into Harvard. Or Oxford.
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But thanks to a new study by John Jerrim at the Institute of Education at the University of London we now know how much easier. At a time when governments on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are increasingly facing questions about the widening gap between rich and poor, Dr. Jerrim studied access to high-status universities in Britain, the United States and Australia.
“My background is economics, and if you look at the economics, kids that go to certain universities earn a premium on their wages during their working lives over and above the premium you get just by going to college,” Dr. Jerrim said. In the United States that premium is about 6 percent, he said.
“The other reason for looking at these particular universities is that they seem to influence access to certain jobs and to act as a signal to high-flying graduate recruiters,” he said. “If you take the job of being prime minister of Britain, for example, you almost have to have gone to Oxford.”
Dr. Jerrim found that students whose parents come from a professional or managerial background are three times as likely to enter a high status university in Britain or Australia as students with working class parents. For the sake of the study a “high status” university in Britain was defined by membership in the Russell Group of large research institutions; in Australia the study looked at students attending the “Group of Eight” coalition of leading universities.
The same threefold advantage applied to students attending prestigious public universities in the United States — those described as “highly selective” by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which rates schools based on the test scores of incoming students. At elite private American universities, moreover, students are six times as likely to come from a professional as a poor or working class background, Dr. Jerrim found.
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