"Back to normal" isn't a thing

The economic boom will start before herd immunity; the consequences of COVID-19 will last forever

Hello! To kick things off today, I need to do some more follow up on “Elite colleges should fight for social justice by helping to educate poor kids.”

I cited data from Avery and Hoxby about the prevalence of high SAT/ACT scores among poor kids. They were making ecological inferences based on where people live. But last year, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a paper by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan that works with administrative data to get a much more precise estimate. They confirm the basic finding that “at any given level of SAT/ACT scores, children from higher-income families attend more selective colleges, suggesting that low- and middle-income students ‘undermatch’ to college.”

But they find that if you restrict yourself to the very most selective private institutions (what they call Ivy Plus), having totally income-neutral admissions would lead to a big increase in the share of middle-class kids, but only a modest increase…