Wealth Trumps Income in Determining College Access, Study Finds

By Peter Schmidt

New Orleans

The financial assets that families own play a much bigger role than the income that they earn in determining whether and where their children will go to college, concludes a study scheduled to be presented here Saturday at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.

"Much research has been devoted to the effects of income, but wealth has appreciably more influence on who applies to college, who enrolls in college, and the type of college they attend," says