The Schoolyard: Gail Cornwall

Not Rich or Poor Enough for the Ivy League Why do the pretty well off have the worst college acceptance rates?

- 

LINDA AND ROMAN FIRST discovered their income was a school-admissions albatross when their daughter was 4 years old and they began applying to private kindergartens in Manhattan. The couple interviewed at one particular elite co-ed school, and at the end of the conversation, the admissions officer was blunt. “She said, ‘You seem really lovely, and your daughter seems lovely, but I just want to be straight with you: You’re in a dead zone,’” recalls Roman. She went on to explain that the couple didn’t make enough money to be considered potential donors and Olivia wasn’t a kid the school could lift out of poverty. Roman worked at a corporate-law firm but wasn’t an equity partner. “We were just barely scraping by, by Manhattan standards,” he says of the family’s low-six-figure income, which placed them in the top 10 percent nationally but in the bottom 20 percent of tuition-paying private-school parents in Manhattan, he estimates.

Olivia — a pseudonym, as are the names of the other families in this story — wound up at another prestigious prep school, where she ultimately became a stellar student and student-body president. As her senior year approached, she named Yale as one of her top college choices. That’s when Roman’s income reared its head again. The family wasn’t paranoid; her disadvantage was backed by data.