Much has been written about a new study by Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery, which found that talented, poor kids are not graduating from elite colleges at the same levels as rich kids. The New York Times reports, 

Only 34 percent of high-achieving high school seniors in the bottom fourth of income distribution attended any one of the country’s 238 most selective colleges, according to the analysis, conducted by Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard, two longtime education researchers. Among top students in the highest income quartile, that figure was 78 percent.

This  is great research, which provides awesome data. It brought national attention to a topic that's important to me. The next step in the research should be qualitative. Someone actually needs to talk to these kids to find out why they don't apply to elite colleges and what changes need to be made to get that kid from Camden into the lecture hall at Harvard. 

My guess is that some kids aren't going to elite colleges, because of an information gap. They don't know about those schools and don't realize that they will get substantial discounts on tuition. They don't have the same information networks that exist in wealthy suburban neighborhood. No high school provides great information about colleges to their students, except for the fancy private schools, but kids in suburban areas learn about college rankings, safety schools, SAT test prep centers, and the benefits of padding the application with phony after-school activities from peers and the communtiy. Poor kids don't get that. 

I think that poor kids are also not applying to far-off elite colleges, because they don't want to. Their networks and their community are local. They don't want to throw themselves into a vastly different culture, where they don't have the right clothes and don't share the same cultural references. 

But these are just my guesses. I would love to run me some focus groups.