Studies vary, but many find negative conclusions about the high school performance of low-income youth vs. their high-income peers. One study by the National Center for Education Statistics, for example, found that low-income students were five times more likely to drop out of high school than their high-income counterparts. In another study in the American Sociological Review, researchers found that even growing up in a low-income neighborhood reduced a student's chances of graduating from high school by more than 10 percentage points.
With low-income students graduating from high school at lower rates, college admissions are predictably also impacted by a student's income background. A recent study by the Brookings Institute, for example, found that even low-income students who do perform well in high school are less likely to attend a selective, elite college or university. According to the study, high-income students are more likely to apply to a mix of "safety," "par" and "reach" colleges, while low-income students merely apply to "safeties."
Since graduating high school and getting into college is more difficult for low-income students, it stands to reason that making it through a four-year bachelor's degree program also poses challenges. According to Martha Bailey, an economist at the University of Michigan, 54 percent of students from wealthy backgrounds obtain bachelor's degrees, compared to 9 percent of students from low-income backgrounds. Poor college retention rates among low-income students might be attributed to the higher levels of student loan debt that these student need to incur.
Students from low-income family backgrounds who made it through college continue to face obstacles in graduate school programs, though the barriers to achievement are less. One study by Kevin Kniffin of the University of Arizona, for example, found that first-generation college students from low-income backgrounds were much less likely than their middle- and high-income counterparts to enroll in a doctoral program. On the contrary, though, Kniffin's report also found good news when it came to MBA programs, where there was no significant difference between first-generation college graduates and their counterparts.