The children of the affluent have advantages every step of the way. A 3-year-old who grows up with parents making more than $100,000 a year is about twice as likely to attend preschool as a 3-year-old with parents who make less than $60,000. By eighth grade, children from affluent families are performing four grade levels higher than children from poor families, a gap that has widened by 40 to 50 percent in recent decades. According to College Board data from this year, by the time students apply to college, children from families making more than $118,000 a year score 171 points higher on their SATs than students from families making $72,000 to $90,000 a year, and 265 points higher than children from families making less than $56,000. As Markovits has noted, the academic gap between the rich and the poor is larger than the academic gap between white and Black students in the final days of Jim Crow.
Source: David Brooks, The Atlantic