For years, the members of WU/FUSED have been asking the administration a single question: Will you provide us with a breakdown of the income distribution in the student body? Each time that we have asked, their response has been the same: No.

It was not until last week, when a group of researchers got their hands on anonymous tax records and tuition filings that we finally received the financial data. It’s no wonder Washington University has been secretive: The results are devastating. The class of 2013 had 15.5 percent more students from families in the top one percent than from the bottom 60 percent of the family income distribution. Out of 2,395 colleges, we rank first for the percentage of students with family incomes over $110,000. In other words, 86 percent of our students are from the top quintile of family income. Additionally, we ranked second to last in the number of students from families in the poorest 20 percent. Once again, Wash. U. is No. 1 in the rankings for all the wrong reasons.

In its mission statement, the University pledges “to welcome students, faculty and staff from all backgrounds to create an inclusive community that is welcoming, nurturing and intellectually rigorous.” We’ve known for several years now that Wash. U. has been failing at least one group of students in this mission. In 2014, the New York Times branded Wash. U. “the nation’s least economically diverse top college” for its low number of Pell-eligible students (around 6 percent). The University reacted the following year by announcing a push to reach 13 percent Pell eligibility by 2020 and announced several new hires and new programs designed to help low-income students succeed on campus.

These initiatives are a positive step to addressing this limited failure, but the recently released data—though it dates from before the Pell-eligible push—show that they are not enough. The University’s problem with socioeconomic diversity is not merely a lack of students from the lowest income brackets. It is also a skewing of the entire demographic structure of the student body towards the children of America’s economic elite. By over-admitting students from the top income bracket, the University is not just failing students from the lowest-income brackets. They are failing middle-income students by squeezing them out of admissions, and they are failing even their highest-income students by trapping them in a bubble that is neither “inclusive” nor “intellectually rigorous.” Washington University claims to be training the future leaders of the country; how can these future leaders lead if they do not understand how most of America lives?

Socioeconomic diversity is much more than the number of Pell-eligible students enrolled at a school. The steps that the University has taken to improve “socioeconomic diversity”—as it has defined it thus far—must be recognized. But the work cannot stop here. Washington University needs to redefine its understanding of “socioeconomic diversity” in a holistic way that shifts emphasis away from just the lowest-income students and focuses on the representation of students from all income and wealth backgrounds. To see why current efforts are inadequate, we can look at a fellow elite university—Middlebury College. In 2013, Middlebury had 14 percent Pell-eligible students. Yet at the same time, 23 percent of Middlebury students hailed from the top 1 percent. Despite its respectable Pell-eligible numbers, Middlebury still has more students in the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent.

By 2020, Washington University could claim to have “fixed” its problem with socioeconomic diversity. It could raise its number of Pell-eligible students to a point that the New York Times would no longer find newsworthy, and then sit back and insist that all the work had been done. Yet even then, Wash. U. could still have more students in the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent. It could continue to squeeze out the middle class, and it could continue to perpetuate the mounting inequality challenging American ideals. Our current policy points to a disappointing future: A hollowing out of the middle that leaves a small bubble of Pell-eligible students feeling isolated amidst a larger bubble of students in the top income quintile.

We would love to believe that the administration, in meeting its Pell-eligible pledge, is not squeezing out middle-income applicants in favor of those who can pay full tuition. But until we receive robust data from the University, we will remain skeptical. We should not have to rely on outside data to guess at the demographics of our school. If Washington University is genuinely committed to improving socioeconomic diversity, then it must take steps to show that commitment. The first step in that must be rethinking its definition of socioeconomic diversity; the second step must be leading the way in disclosing the financial demographics of its student body. Only if the University does so can we be confident that the University truly intends to live up to its mission to “welcome students […] from all backgrounds to create an inclusive community.”

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We are hopeful that the university will be more transparent in the future. But we are also gathering our own information. Help us find out how the student body’s financial demographics have changed since the Pell-eligible push by taking our survey.