First, using the IRS data, Chetty and his team found that students who attend ultraselective colleges in the United States are much more likely than other students to become very rich as adults. Young people who attend “Ivy Plus” institutions—meaning the Ivy League colleges plus a handful of other institutions with similarly elevated selectivity rates, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and Stanford—have about a one in five chance of landing, in their midthirties, among the top 1 percent of American earners, with incomes over $630,000.
