The university in the United States with the largest endowment market value in 2024 was Harvard University, with an endowment fund value of about 51.98 billion U.S. dollars. U.S. higher education Colleges and universities in the United States rank highly among the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher education. Many universities are particularly well known for their strong research capabilities and their connections to many Nobel Prize winning laureates.The U.S. university system is largely decentralized. Except for service academies and staff colleges, the federal government does not directly regulate universities; public universities are administered solely by the individual states. Besides the state administered public universities, there are many private universities in the United States, most are non-profit institutions, similar to the public universities, but there are also a number of institutions that rely on profit (Walden University in Minnesota, for example).In general, tuition fees are required to be paid by students at American universities. Public universities generally charge lower tuition rates to in-state students, than to out-of-state students. Private universities are often much more expensive than public ones because they do not receive funding from state governments.American students are often required to take out student loans to supplement scholarships and grants provided by diverse sources to be able to pay for tuition. Student debt has become a major issue in the United States in recent years, with many Americans unsure if they can even afford to pay off their student loans in the future.

In the school year 2022-2023, Northwestern University was the most expensive college in the United States, with a total annual cost of 89,394 U.S. dollars for out-of-state students. The total annual cost includes tuition and fees, plus room and board.

This statistic shows a break down of the highest level of education achieved by Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans as listed in 2012. 27 of those who make the list of America's billionaires held a high school degree as their highest level of completed education and had never been to college. Amongst the most infamous college dropouts turned billionaire entrepreneurs on the list are of course Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Sean Parker.

There were approximately 18.58 million college students in the U.S. in 2022, with around 13.49 million enrolled in public colleges and a further 5.09 million students enrolled in private colleges. The figures are projected to remain relatively constant over the next few years.

What is the most expensive college in the U.S.? The overall number of higher education institutions in the U.S. totals around 4,000, and California is the state with the most. One important factor that students – and their parents – must consider before choosing a college is cost. With annual expenses totaling almost 78,000 U.S. dollars, Harvey Mudd College in California was the most expensive college for the 2021-2022 academic year. There are three major costs of college: tuition, room, and board. The difference in on-campus and off-campus accommodation costs is often negligible, but they can change greatly depending on the college town.

The differences between public and private colleges Public colleges, also called state colleges, are mostly funded by state governments. Private colleges, on the other hand, are not funded by the government but by private donors and endowments. Typically, private institutions are  much more expensive. Public colleges tend to offer different tuition fees for students based on whether they live in-state or out-of-state, while private colleges have the same tuition cost for every student.

Prior research on trends in educational inequality has focused chiefly on changing gaps in educational attainment by family income or parental occupation. In contrast, this contribution provides the first assessment of trends in educational attainment by family wealth and suggests that we should be at least as much concerned about growing wealth gaps in education. Despite overall growth in educational attainment and some signs of decreasing wealth gaps in high school attainment and college access, I find a large and rapidly increasing wealth gap in college attainment between cohorts born in the 1970 and 1980s, respectively. This growing wealth gap in higher educational attainment co-occurred with a rise in inequality in children's wealth backgrounds, though the analyses also suggest that the latter does not fully account for the former. Nevertheless, the results reported here raise concerns about the distribution of educational opportunity among today's children who grow up in a context of particularly extreme wealth inequality.

Parameter estimates resulting from fitting a regression model to our chosen university based performance measure Y.

The data surveys university students' incomes, employment, housing and changes in these aspects. The survey was carried out by the Research Foundation for Studies and Education (Otus) and funded by the Student Union of Tampere University (TREY), the Student Union of the University of Turku (TYY), the Student Union of the University of Eastern Finland (ISYY), the Student Union of the University of Jyväskylä (JYY) and the Student Union of Åbo Akademi University (ÅAS). First, respondents were asked about the income of carers, moving to another place to study, housing and homelessness, and sharing household expenses. Respondents were also asked to estimate their monthly expenditure. Respondents were asked whether they were receiving any student financial allowances for the studies they were currently pursuing, and how adequate the number of months of financial aid seemed at the moment. The reasons for raising student loans and other sources of income, such as support from parents or other close relatives, were also of interest. Next, they were asked about working, the reasons for working while studying and the impact of working on the progress of their studies. Respondents were asked to assess the adequacy of their own financial resources and their own employment prospects after graduation. Respondents were also asked whether they had taken out consumer credit, applied for food aid or taken any other action in the last 12 months to deal with a tight financial situation. Finally, the respondents were asked about the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on their financial situation. Background variables included year of starting studies, university, faculty, age group, gender, native language, number of children in care and minority status.

Dataset of long-run data on wealth inequality drawn from existing sources and compiled into a single country-year dataset.

We know that students at elite universities tend to be from high-income families, and that graduates are more likely to end up in high-status or high-income jobs. But very little public data has been available on university admissions practices. This dataset, collected by Opportunity Insights, gives extensive detail on college application and admission rates for 139 colleges and universities across the United States, including data on the incomes of students. How do admissions practices vary by institution, and are wealthy students overrepresented?

Motivation

Education equality is one of the most contested topics in society today. It can be defined and explored in many ways, from accessible education to disabled/low-income/rural students to the cross-generational influence of doctorate degrees and tenure track positions. One aspect of equality is the institutions students attend. Consider the “Ivy Plus” universities, which are all eight Ivy League schools plus MIT, Stanford, Duke, and Chicago. Although less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges, they account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century.

A 2023 study (Chetty et al, 2023) tried to understand how these elite institutions affect educational equality:

Do highly selective private colleges amplify the persistence of privilege across generations by taking students from high-income families and helping them obtain high-status, high-paying leadership positions? Conversely, to what extent could such colleges diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of society’s leaders by changing their admissions policies?

To answer these questions, they assembled a dataset documenting the admission and attendance rate for 13 different income bins for 139 selective universities around the country. They were able to access and link not only student SAT/ACT scores and high school grades, but also parents’ income through their tax records, students’ post-college graduate school enrollment or employment (including earnings, employers, and occupations), and also for some selected colleges, their internal admission ratings for each student. This dataset covers students in the entering classes of 2010–2015, or roughly 2.4 million domestic students.

They found that children from families in the top 1% (by income) are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores, and two-thirds of this gap can be attributed to higher admission rates with similar scores, with the remaining third due to the differences in rates of application and matriculation (enrollment conditional on admission). This is not a shocking conclusion, but we can further explore elite college admissions by socioeconomic status to understand the differences between elite private colleges and public flagships admission practices, and to reflect on the privilege we have here and to envision what a fairer higher education system could look like.

Data

The data has been aggregated by university and by parental income level, grouped into 13 income brackets. The income brackets are grouped by percentile relative to the US national income distribution, so for instance the 75.0 bin represents parents whose incomes are between the 70th and 80th percentile. The top two bins overlap: the 99.4 bin represents parents between the 99 and 99.9th percentiles, while the 99.5 bin represents parents in the top 1%.

Each row represents students’ admission and matriculation outcomes from one income bracket at a given university. There are 139 colleges covered in this dataset.

The variables include an array of different college-level-income-binned estimates for things including attendance rate (both raw and reweighted by SAT/ACT scores), application rate, and relative attendance rate conditional on application, also with respect to specific test score bands for each college and in/out-of state. Colleges are categorized into six tiers: Ivy Plus, other elite schools (public and private), highly selective public/private, and selective public/private, with selectivity generally in descending order. It also notes whether a college is public and/or flagship, where “flagship” means public flagship universities. Furthermore, they also report the relative application rate for each income bin within specific test bands, which are 50-point bands that had the most attendees in each school tier/category.

Several values are reported in “test-score-reweighted” form. These values control for SAT score: they are calculated separately for each SAT score value, then averaged with weights based on the distribution of SAT scores at the institution.

Note that since private schools typically don’t differentiate between in-...

It is probably no surprise that, as of 2019, Harvard had produced more ultra-high net worth (UHNW) individuals than any other university in the world, with ***** Harvard graduates becoming UHNWs. Stanford produced the second-most UHNWs, with ***. None of the top ten universities were located in the United States.

This dataset provides indications of relevant variables on personal wealth and attitudes towards wealth from over two dozen household panel datasets. It can be used by researchers to locate variables of interest in studies of wealth inequality.

In 2023 and 2024, the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University was ranked as the least expensive quality business school in the United States, with a tuition costs of 234 U.S. dollars per credit for in-state, full-time students. MBA programs generally require between 30 to 60 credits which can be completed by full-time students in about two years.

Replication data and code for Ellora Derenoncourt, Chi Hyun Kim, Moritz Kuhn, Moritz Schularick, Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860–2020, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2023;, qjad044, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjad044

Large-scale, scientist-led, participatory science (citizen science) projects often engage primarily participants who are White, wealthy, and well-educated. Calls to diversify contributory projects are increasingly common, but little research has evaluated the efficacy of suggested strategies for diversification. We engaged participants in Crowd the Tap through facilitator organizations like Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), predominantly White institutions (PWI), high school science classrooms, and corporate volunteer programs. Crowd the Tap is a contributory project focused on identifying and addressing lead contamination in household drinking water in the United States. We investigated how participant diversity with respect to race, ethnicity, and homeownership (a proxy for income) differed between participation facilitated through a partner organization and in unfacilitated participation in which participants came to the project independently. We were also interested in which facilitators were most effective at increasing participant diversity. White and wealthy participants were overrepresented in unfacilitated participation. Facilitation helped increase engagement of people of color, especially Black households, and lower-income households. High schools were particularly effective at engaging Hispanic or Latino participants and HBCUs were important for engaging Black households. Ultimately, our results suggest that engagement through facilitator organizations may be an effective means of engaging diverse participants in large-scale projects. Our results have important implications for the field of participatory science as we seek to identify evidence-based strategies for diversifying project participants.

A statistical summary of the university based response variable (Y) by school quintile.

Does the measurement of the racial wealth gap shift depending on the model, method, and data set used? We contrast the traditional mean Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition with the distributional Recentered Influence Function (RIF) methods. The untransformed, logarithm-transformed, and inverse hyperbolic sine-transformed versions in both Survey of Consumer Finances and Panel Study of Income Dynamics data sets exhibit similarities. The Oaxaca-Blinder (mean) decomposition highlights that receiving an inheritance explains a larger portion of the racial wealth gap than educational attainment. Conversely, the RIF method at the median suggests that educational attainment accounts for more of the wealth gap than inheritance receipt.

Replication files for the paper "Expropriation of the Church's wealth and political violence in 19th century Colombia."It includes a complete dataset (in folder data) and a Stata do-file to replicate the tables and figures from the paper.The other folders are now empty but the program is written to save figures and tables in them.

The study charted the consumer choices and behaviour of students at the University of Tampere, Finland. Three areas of consumption were paid special attention to, namely, clothing, hobbies, and food. First, the respondents' life situations were surveyed as well as their attitudes towards consumption, for example, how much they thought about their consumer choices and what kind of consumers they thought they were. Readiness to engage in different forms of civic participation was investigated. Relating to clothing, the respondents were asked, for instance, how often they bought new or used clothes, what they wanted other people to think about them based on their appearance, whether they saw themselves as belonging to a certain group on the basis of the clothes they wore, and whether they thought that there were different groups at the university that were distinguishable by people's apperances. With regard to hobbies, the questions focused on the money spent on a hobby that was considered important by the respondents, whether they felt a sense of belonging with other people who had the same hobby, and what they wanted others to think about them based on the hobby. Spending and consumer choices relating to food were investigated by asking the respondents how much money they spent on household food purchases per week, what kind of reasons and principles affected their food purchases, whether they were able to follow these principles in their financial situations, and what they wanted others to think about them based on the choices they made regarding food purchases. The background variables included, among others, the respondent's gender, year of birth, department of study, living arrangements, financial situation, political party identification, membership in organizations, and the year when R started studies.

The number of Chinese students going abroad for study reached 704,000 in 2024, roughly the same figure as in 2019. The number of students going overseas had fallen to only 451,000 in 2020 due to the Coronavirus pandemic and it took four years to recover to the previous level again. Motivations for overseas study In China, some of the best universities are public universities which get most of their support from the government. Although the number of institutions for higher education and students enrolled in universities inside China have increased significantly in the last few years, the pathways to gaining admission to good universities are still limited. For most people, the national exam “Gaokao” remains the only way to enter a good public university. Therefore, there are students studying abroad to avoid the national exam and to gain admission to a better ranked university. For some study programs, overseas institutions are better equipped and can provide more international academic environment. These qualities attract a lot of Chinese scholars. People who have studied abroad are considered to have a global insight and better language skills, which makes them more competitive in China’s recruitment market. Financing for overseas study Developed countries and regions are still the most popular destinations for Chinese students studying abroad. In some countries, Chinese students have already become an important funding source for their local universities. English-speaking countries including the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia are the leading destinations among them. The United States have since long attracted the largest share of Chinese students, but in recent years more and more Chinese students preferred to study in the United Kingdom instead. However, since students studying abroad are not all from extremely wealthy families, non-English speaking countries where the universities charge less in tuition fees are becoming increasingly popular. While most students from China were self-funded, relying on their parents' support, the number of students who were state scholarship recipients had been increasing over the years.

The zip files contain several files with wills from Mexico between 1810 and 1910 collected in order to measure Mexican wealth distribution in its first century of independence. The main file is wills_clean.xlsx, which contains the full collection of wills; in that file, you will find variables for year, state, and wealth, not excluding debts, debts and wealth (net wealth). You can combine this file with the do file cleaningroutine_for_social_tables to produce the detailed social tables.

The rest of the files consist of data files with the social tables (for comparison) and xlsx files with the wills from the main file divided by decade to facilitate calculations using the do file inequality_analysis_ routine_clean.do from which you will be able to reproduce the rest of the analysis (unbalanced sample and generalized beta, lognormal, etc.)

Note: The calculation programs are .do files; thus, they require stata to be executed. Some of the detailed social tables are dta files, and thus also stata files. You can open them in R and work with them or convert them to any other data format.

The wills come from 5 different Mexican archives: Archivo Histórico de Notarias de la Ciudad de México, Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán, Archivo Municipal de Saltillo, Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de Morelia and, Testamentos del Colegio de Sonora.