Replicating Affluence Is Not the Path to Equity

For more than a decade, I’ve directed a college access program serving students from Chicago Public Schools; many are first-generation college-bound students, from low-income families, and students of color. In that time, I’ve watched our field operate from an unspoken premise: that replicating what affluent students receive is the path to equity.

We reverse engineer elite prep schools, breaking down their components—low counselor-to-student ratios, summer enrichment, professional networks, intensive college advising—and deliver them to high-achieving students from underresourced communities. Then we measure success by how closely their outcomes mirror those of affluent peers: enrollment at selective institutions, high starting salaries and four-year graduation rates.

I’ve started calling this pattern “affluency replication.” And I’ve come to believe it’s solving the wrong problem.

The Illusion of Objective Metrics

Recent data from the Opportunity Insights research group at Harvard University reignited a familiar debate. Their 2023 study, analyzing admissions data from elite colleges, found that among students with comparable test scores, wealthy students received higher ratings on nonacademic factors, earning higher marks for their extracurricular activities and on the basis of their teacher or counselor recommendations— a pattern likely attributable to the resources of their high schools.

Some have read this data to mean we should rely on test scores and grades, thereby stripping out the subjective measures that wealthy families can “game.” It sounds democratizing.

This solution assumes standardized tests serve as a neutral baseline, but they are not. The same Opportunity Insights research found that students from the top 1 percent of wealth are 13 times more likely to score 1300 or higher on the SAT than students from low-income families. Almost one-third of students from the highest-income households reach that threshold, compared to fewer than 5 percent of middle-class students and just 2.4 percent of students from the lowest income quintile.

A Penn Wharton analysis makes the pattern even clearer: SAT and ACT scores show a 0.22 correlation with household income, while high school GPA and class rank correlate at only 0.06 to 0.10, less than half as strong. The “objective” metrics some propose as the solution are actually more correlated with wealth than the subjective ones they replace.

The holistic review, designed to counteract the wealth advantage, also favors affluent students. A study from Stanford University’s Center for Education Policy Analysis analyzed 60,000 University of California applications and found that essay content correlates with family income even more strongly than SAT scores. Their finding that “class is present in aspects of the file that are often perceived as qualitative counterweights to standardized assessments” is no surprise, given that wealthier students have access to coaches who can tell them precisely how to frame any experience as an obstacle overcome, while students who’ve faced genuine hardship often don’t narrate it in ways that the system recognizes. The admissions system rewards the performance of resilience, not resilience itself.

The problem, in short, is not that we haven’t found the right metric. The problem is that every metric in the system tends to advantage affluent students, because the system was built within and for an affluent context.

What Affluence Actually Provides

Test prep, tutoring, stable housing, food security, parents with time to help with homework, schools with adequate resources and experienced teachers: All of this shapes academic performance long before a student sits for the SAT or ACT. The disparities don’t begin at the testing center; they start at kindergarten—research shows that children from high-income families already arrive with advantages in vocabulary, readiness and health that compound over 13 years of schooling.

But affluence provides something else that no college access program can replicate: freedom.

Affluent students have the freedom to major in art history, classics or anthropology without family pressure to choose “practical” fields. Students from high socioeconomic backgrounds may gravitate toward humanities and arts, majors offering cultural capital and room for exploration: One study found that students with more educated parents are more likely to pursue fields with lower early-career earnings but faster earnings growth. Meanwhile, first-generation and low-income students often feel pressure to choose vocational fields that offer immediate earnings—not because they lack interest in other disciplines, but because economic anxiety forecloses the question.

One student captured this constraint perfectly: He felt obligated to study engineering “so that one day his child can study art.”

This is what affluency replication misses. We can provide the components: counseling, test prep and professional networks. However, we cannot provide the underlying conditions that make those components work differently for affluent students: the freedom to fail, explore and choose without economic consequence.

The Limits of Navigation

The college access field has gotten very good at teaching students to navigate systems. We decode hidden curricula, demystify admissions processes and build bridges across information asymmetries that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

This work matters. But navigation alone accepts the system’s terms. We teach students to succeed within structures whose very logic advantages affluence, then we measure our success by how well they’ve learned to operate inside that logic. Even when navigation works, it produces individual exceptions to structural patterns while leaving the patterns intact.

In my own program, we’re in the middle of redesigning our approach in order to develop students’ understanding of the systems they’re navigating, not just their ability to move through them. I don’t have neat outcome data to report yet. What I have is a growing conviction that the old approach isn’t enough and that this is the moment to try something different.

Real equity would make much of our field unnecessary. Working toward that outcome means working toward our own obsolescence, and that might be the most honest measure of whether equity is truly our goal.

Beyond Affluency Replication

I’m not arguing we should stop helping students. I run one of these programs. I believe in this work.

I am arguing that we need to stop measuring our success by how well students learn to perform affluence. We need to stop searching for the least gameable metric as if the right measurement tool will somehow neutralize a system designed to reproduce advantage. We need to ask different questions.

Not: How do we give first-generation students what affluent students have?

But: Why does college admissions require professional navigation in the first place? Who benefits from the information asymmetries that make our programs necessary? What would it look like to transform these structures rather than help individuals escape them, one at a time?

The honest answer is that moving beyond affluency replication requires work at multiple levels, most of it beyond what any college access program can do alone. It means developing students’ critical consciousness about the systems shaping their lives, not just their ability to navigate those systems. It means advocating for policy shifts in how we fund early education and allocating resources to underresourced schools. It means addressing the material conditions, such as poverty, housing instability and food insecurity, that shape academic performance long before any admissions metric comes into play.

None of this is simple. Some of it requires political will that doesn’t currently exist. But naming the problem clearly is a prerequisite to solving it. As long as we keep confusing proximity to affluence with progress toward equity, we’ll keep celebrating access while the structures that make our work necessary remain unchanged.