This is patently unfair, and scrapping such 21 5/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  policies would help increase economic mobility. 21I really don’t see how our best universities can continue to justify this practice. Yes, fund-raising might suffer slightly over time—but I suspect the impact would be very small. More importantly, do we really want to encourage what is essentially a “donate to admit” policy at our major universities? Such an approach only preserves the status quo and constrains economic mobility. The research shows that upward mobility differs substantially across colleges. Ivy League schools are good at producing top earners, but, as I noted, they accept very few lower-income students, so their impact on income mobility is small. Meanwhile, other schools with economically diverse student bodies produce few high earners, and their impact is likewise small. Then there are certain schools—some of which can be found in the CUNY and California state systems—that manage to produce a large number of high earners from economically diverse student bodies. Learning exactly how they do it and how it can be replicated strikes me as a first-order question for further study. While I am distressed by the high and increasing levels of inequality and diminished mobility that our economy has delivered over the last several decades, I remain optimistic about the future. There is more attention now to inequality and low intergenerational mobility than I can recall at any time during my professional life.
16 See the New York Fed’s Economic Press Briefing on Household Borrowing, Student Debt Trends and  Homeownership, April 3, 2017. 17 For example, the default rate for students from relatively modest backgrounds is around 35 percent, 2-3 times  that of those from wealthier backgrounds. See Press Briefing on Household Debt, with Focus on Student Debt, p.26. 18 Bleemer, Brown, Lee, Strair, and van der Klaauw, 2017. Echoes of Rising Tuition in Students’ Borrowing,  Educational Attainment, and Homeownership in Post-Recession America . Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no. 820 (July). Tracy, Schneider, and Chan, 1999. Are Stocks Overtaking Real Estate in Household Portfolios? Current Issues in Economics and Finance, vol. 5, no. 5 (April). 19 Zafar, Bleemer, Brown, and van der Klaauw, 2014. What Americans (Don’t) Know about Student Loan  Collections. Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics (June 5). 20 Chetty, Friedman, Saez, Turner, and Yagan, 2017. Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in  Intergenerational Mobility. NBER Working Paper No. 23618 (July). 21 See Richard Reeves, Dream Hoarders (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2017). 7/7  BIS central bankers' speeches