Cutting against this democratizing trend in the United States, however, is the soaring cost of a university education: it more than tripled as a proportion of the national median salary between 1963 and 2013.10 This has made the top universities more socially exclusive, even as they have become more important for success. The elite universities have grown richer both in their endowments and in the academic qualifications of the students they admit, relative to less well-positioned institutions.
