The findings represent a revision of data published last year in a similar report that was called into question by other scholars.

The Distribution of Family Income for 18-to-24-Year-Olds Who Earned a Bachelor’s Degree

Indicators of Higher Education Equity in the United States, 2016 Historical Trend Report

A different collection of datasets the researchers used shows that 60 percent of students from the top quarter of households by socioeconomics graduate with bachelor’s degrees within 10 years of finishing high school—four times as often as students from the lowest quarter of households.

The colleges students attend vary significantly according to family wealth, as well. Nearly 70 percent of students in the nation’s most selective colleges are from that top socioeconomic quartile; the same is true for just 4 percent of students from the lowest socioeconomic rung, according to federal surveys of 2002 sophomores that the researchers used. (One major bone scholars have to pick with federal college data is that clear information linking family wealth to degree completion is hard to come by, and the information that is available is often outdated.)

Students eligible to receive federal grants because they were considered low-income were more than three times as likely to attend for-profit institutions in 2013 as students who didn’t receive federal grants. For-profit colleges typically charge higher tuition rates than four-year and two-year public schools and generally have far lower graduation rates than public four-year schools.

“Differences in enrollment patterns by family income reflect the stratification of the financial, academic, and other resources that are required to enroll in different colleges and universities,” Laura Perna and Roman Ruiz of the University of Pennsylvania and a colleague wrote in an essay accompanying the report. “Students from higher-income families have the resources that enable meaningful choice from among the array of available options nationwide. But, resource constraints and structural failures often limit the ‘choices’ of students from lower-income families to the local or online, non-selective or for-profit postsecondary educational institution.”

Many advocates argue that changing the federal financial-aid system to increase the amount students can receive in grants rather than loans with favorable interest rates would ease the concerns of high-performing, low-income students about college affordability. To that end, one proposal in the report calls for increasing the maximum Pell grant award—the primary federal higher-education grant aid for low-income students that today maxes out at around $5,800 per academic year—to $13,000 per student. States, the report goes on to propose, would cover half of that new $13,000 Pell award. “If states had invested in public higher education in 2015 at the same rate they had in 1980 they would have appropriated $65.2 billion more than they did,” according to the report.