Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges, according to a new analysis [1] of every high school student who took the SAT in a recent year, the New York Times reports. The pattern contributes to widening economic inequality and low levels of mobility [2] in this country, economists say, because college graduates earn so much more on average than nongraduates do. Low-income students who excel in high school often do not graduate from the less selective colleges they attend. 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 [3] of Stanford and Christopher Avery [4] of Harvard, two longtime education researchers. Among top students in the highest income quartile, that figure was 78 percent…