Last month, a team of researchers, led by Raj Chetty of Stanford University and John Friedman of Brown University, released a new report estimating “mobility ratings” for nearly all colleges in the country. The ratings represent how well institutions enable students from low-income backgrounds to both access and reap the benefits of college.
Brigham Young University’s flagship campus scores surprisingly poorly on promoting upward social mobility.
On this mobility metric, BYU ranked 2,125 out of 2,137 institutions. Only 12 fared worse. Compared only among Division I research universities, BYU occupies the bottom spot.
Being a proud Cougar alum and an education policy researcher, this news hit hard and felt alien to my own experience at the Y. Confronted with this finding, I dug deeper and consulted with the study’s authors about BYU’s anomalous result.
Access vs. success
The mobility ratings are the product of a college’s access rate multiplied by its success rate. Access measures the share of students entering from households with incomes in the bottom 20 percent nationally. Success represents the share of students from low-income families ending up in the nation’s top 20 percent of earners as 30-something adults.
The authors readily concede the rankings understate BYU’s success (ranked in the nation’s top 20 percent), likely due to marriage and family choices. BYU sticks out with a high marriage rate and low female workforce participation rate among its 30-something alums. Calculating BYU’s success rate among males only, or using total household income, places BYU among the nation’s top 10 and 15 percent, respectively.
But success has never been BYU’s problem. Rather, the problem is access for low-income students.
BYU’s accessibility for low-income students is lower than 99 percent of all colleges nationally. Less than 2 percent of students come from households with incomes in the bottom 20 percent. It has a lower access rate than most elite institutions, including Stanford, Duke University and Ivy League powerhouses Harvard University and Yale University.
Moreover, BYU’s access rate has been declining over the past 10 years.
Increasing access
Income inequality in the U.S. has been increasing since the 1970s and intergenerational mobility has fallen since the 1940s. Attendance at a high-quality college for a low-income student could have implications over generations.
Unfortunately, low-income students are largely absent from the very institutions that are most likely to improve their outcomes. Rather, they disproportionately enroll at two-year and for-profit colleges, often at greater cost and with lower success.
Income — not merit — increasingly determines access to quality college options, a worrisome development for the American dream. Due to these trends, calls for greater socioeconomic diversity in the nation’s top colleges are growing.
As a leading university, BYU needs to consider how it can increase its socioeconomic diversity.
Recent research bolsters this proposition, suggesting an ample supply of high-achieving, low-income students exists and could do roughly as well as more affluent peers in the same schools. But for a variety of reasons, they never choose to apply to selective universities like BYU.
Instead, they set their sights lower and go to schools without admissions standards or sometimes just never enroll. Their potential simply goes unrealized.
Yes, it may take some creativity to find these students. BYU is attractive primarily to Mormons, a relatively well-educated and affluent populace, and is in Utah, a state with low levels of poverty. But not all Mormons and Utahns are above the poverty line; I encourage the Y to try reaching more of those below it.
Many worry that increasing socioeconomic diversity will inherently lower standards, but that is not necessarily true. BYU could learn from the American Talent Initiative, a consortium of 30 elite colleges committed to graduating 50,000 more low-income students by 2025 while maintaining rigorous standards.
Some schools have simply tweaked admissions criteria; for example, assigning less weight to SAT scores and more to GPAs has made some colleges more accessible to disadvantaged students. BYU could consider removing points for extracurricular activities, as they may be a luxury for teens working to help with family finances.
Creating access means more than offering cheap tuition. It means actively identifying those who have real potential and inspiring them to take a leap of faith. As they succeed, together we can all rise and shout.
Michael Hansen (BYU Economics B.S., 2003) is a senior fellow and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.