Today’s debate over the future of higher education is often framed as a choice between diversity and meritocracy, as if universities must choose between the identity and the quality of their students. But while that paradigm may fit easily into the extreme partisan politics of today, the real question may center on the role of wealth in the admissions process. What if we could design admissions policies that are more meritocratic and increase socioeconomic diversity?
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The tension is reflected in TIME’s new ranking of the World’s Top Universities (listed below). The ranking places emphasis on the extent to which students achieve extraordinary success, for instance in patenting new inventions or rising to leadership roles in business. These lists help us understand where students are likely to achieve the greatest success and contribute most to society as the world order shifts; U.S. and U.K. universities continue to lead in academic performance, while China’s universities are pulling ahead in innovation and economic impact. But they also reveal an uncomfortable reality: in most countries, these top universities are most accessible to children from high-income families, limiting their socioeconomic diversity.
Methodology: How TIME and Statista Determined the World’s Top Universities of 2026
Our own research using big data to study the outcomes of millions of college students over time underscores this point in the United States. Fewer than 1% of Americans attend the 12 “Ivy-Plus” colleges (the eight Ivy League schools plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and the University of Chicago), yet they account for over 13% of those in the top 0.1% of earners, a quarter of U.S. Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century.
These institutions don’t merely select talented students but directly change their life trajectories. Comparing waitlisted students who were accepted vs. rejected from these institutions essentially by chance, we find that those who attend an Ivy-Plus college are far more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution, work at prestigious firms, and achieve success in many other dimensions. Selective colleges have extraordinary influence.
Because these institutions offer such a unique pipeline to leadership positions, it is important that they select students in ways that provide the broadest possible access within the most qualified students. For many, the primary justification for this priority is moral: there is perhaps no more widely shared principle than equality of opportunity, the belief that a child’s opportunities should not depend on their family background, income, or ZIP code.
But even setting aside this principle, there is a powerful pragmatic case for diversity as well: nations grow faster when they tap into the broadest possible talent pool to contribute to society. No one benefits from excluding those who could have discovered new lifesaving drugs, started companies that innovate and grow the economy, or improved communities through creative work in government or the non-profit sector.
How do top universities fare in attracting talent from all backgrounds? Unfortunately, the data show that access for talented students from families outside the traditional “elite” is much more restricted than it ought to be. Our research on the 12 Ivy-Plus colleges in the U.S.—all of which rank among TIME’s top 60—shows that students from wealthy backgrounds are heavily overrepresented: more than 15% come from families in the top 1% of the U.S. national income distribution, who have incomes above $600,000 per year.
Data from other countries similarly bears this out; for instance, students from private high schools in the United Kingdom account for nearly half of those at Oxford and Cambridge (ranked no. 1 and no. 7 globally in TIME’s new ranking) despite accounting for just 7% of all high school students. In Chile, students from elite private schools are 16 times more likely to enroll in the most selective programs at the nation’s top universities (University of Chile, ranked no. 461, and Pontificia Universidad Catolica) than the average student. The pattern is clear: the world’s most influential universities serve society’s most privileged families.
One might imagine that the lack of socioeconomic diversity arises from meritocratic admissions practices. Some of the skew towards wealthy students does arise from differences in pre-college resources—such as the quality of schools children attend or the neighborhoods in which they grow up. But much of it arises purely from college admissions policies.
Consider two students who apply to college with an SAT score of 1500, one from a family in the top 1% and another from a middle-class family. The student from the high-income family is more than twice as likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college as students from middle class families. A student whose parents are business executives are far more likely to be admitted to top-ranked colleges than a student with the same high school test scores and grades whose parents are teachers or bus drivers.
If students from the top 1% were admitted to Ivy-Plus schools at the same rate as middle-class students with the same SAT or ACT scores, the share of students from the top 1% at America’s top colleges would fall by nearly half.
Three factors drive the high-income admissions advantage: legacy preferences, non-academic ratings, and athletic recruitment. Applicants from top 1% families whose parents attended an Ivy-plus college (“legacy applicants”) are five times more likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college than peers with comparable credentials whose parents did not attend. Students from high-income families also score higher on non-academic aspects of applications, largely because they are more likely to attend private high schools with greater access to extracurriculars, college counseling, and other support for the application process. Recruited athletes, who (perhaps surprisingly to many outside America) make up 10-15% of top American universities’ incoming students, also skew heavily toward high-income families who are able to hire the coaches and provide the support needed for students to excel in athletics.
One might be able to justify these admissions preferences if they helped universities find students with unusually high potential. But our data show just the opposite: these admissions advantages do not predict future success. Legacy students, those with higher non-academic ratings, and recruited athletes are no more likely—and often less likely—to reach top income levels, attend elite graduate schools, or work at prestigious companies than comparable Ivy-Plus applicants. By contrast, academic factors such as test scores and grades are highly predictive of post-college outcomes.
The bottom line is that the debate about meritocracy vs. diversity itself misses the point: When we measure merit by what predicts success—not by parental wealth—meritocracy can actually increase diversity. Admitting students to top-ranked colleges on the basis of their own merit would increase the representation of students from middle-class families on college campuses and expand the talent pool for businesses to hire. Top American universities that serve as gateways to leadership could both broaden access and strengthen meritocratic norms in admissions by focusing more heavily on indicators of academic potential and reducing preferences that primarily track family income. Eliminating legacy preferences, reducing the weight placed on non-academic factors such as extracurriculars and athletics, and being more transparent about admissions criteria would help move these institutions closer to a meritocracy while opening their doors to a wider group of students.
Expanding access to colleges that are pathways to success is particularly important in this era of growing mistrust of the establishment. Admissions policies that present non-meritocratic barriers to many students reinforce the perception that elite universities protect privilege instead of cultivating talent. This is not to say that diversity and academic merit will never be in tension in college admissions, especially given the large disparities in access to high-quality K-12 education and other resources before children apply to college. But for now, opening the gates of the world’s top universities based on talent rather than family income stands to benefit everyone—not just graduates.
Methodology: How TIME and Statista Determined the World’s Top Universities of 2026