Education and Inequality

I really enjoyed this fact-filled conversation about education, friendships, community/neighborhoods, inequality, social and geographic mobility, role models, and college admissions between NYU professor Scott Galloway and Harvard professor Raj Chetty:

I encourage you to watch the whole conversation, but I’ll highlight one thing Professor Chetty said:

“You’re about 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college if you come from the top 1% relative to the bottom 20% of the income distribution….

There’s a pipeline starting at birth or maybe even before – I’m thinking of prenatal factors all the way to college application & attendance – of disparities that kids from different backgrounds face. That 77 factor is the end result of a system where kids from lower-end families are growing up in different neighborhoods, going to often less well resourced schools, exposed to different types of role models…

[Finally] even if you take two kids with the same SAT scores, even then you’re like 2 to 2 1/2 times more likely to be attending an Ivy League college if you’re from a top 1% family. All these different factors compound to get to that 77 factor.”