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.