Take a look at research by Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery. The vast majority of low-income high achievers do not apply to any selective college. More outreach, better guidance would help but the majority of the Ivy League caliber “one-offs” are white while 15% are Asians and 15% are URMs.

I think a lot of folks living on the coasts forget that the country is still at least 65% non-Hispanic white. That said, the figure is less than 60% for people under the age of 30; as of the 2014 American Community Survey, it’s only 51.8% for persons under age 18.

Legacy admissions aren’t nearly as much a factor in the whiteness of the Ivy League as is the sheer wealth of the vast majority of students. They still matter—God knows there were plenty of dumbshit legacies in my entering class at Cornell—but if every Ivy ditched legacy admissions tomorrow, at least half of the spots…