American colleges vary widely in how effectively they move students from poverty into prosperity, a Mobility Report Card released by the Equal Opportunity Project at Stanford University finds.
The report strikes a chord at a time when the American dream of intergenerational mobility is slipping away in the eyes many low- and middle-income American voters. There is widespread consensus that President Donald Trump's victory in key Midwestern states was driven by blue collar voters despairing at the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs, fearful of how their children will fare in the emerging economy.
Researchers looked at students' parental income and the earnings of students after graduation, using "de-identified" federal government data — data dawn from individual student records but stripped of personal details to protect privacy.
Schools were graded based on how many students from the lowest economic strata attended the school, and how many of those students went on to top quintile earning levels after graduation.
Compared to the rest of the country, the study shows that Utah colleges have room to grow when it comes to enabling leaps from poverty to prosperity.
From 1999 to 2013, the average U.S. school lifted 1.9 percent of its students from the lowest quintile to the top quintile of earnings. The closest Utah school on this "mobility index" average was the University of Utah at 1.2 percent, with the weakest being Utah State University at 0.6 percent.
The other Utah public schools and Brigham Young University, owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, fall in between. (Westminster College, a private college in Salt Lake, scored 1.7, but it's cohort was quite small and so statistically less compelling.)
The report highlighted a number of surprising schools on this mobility measure, including California State University, Los Angeles at 9.9 percent, South Texas College at 6.9 and the University of Texas, El Paso at 6.8.
"The engines of academic mobility in the U.S. seem to be the second-tier, non-flagship state campus," said Nick Flamang, a pre-doctoral fellow at the Equal Opportunity Project. "They provide access to lower-income students, and many of them provide really good outcomes for those students."
Flamang points to the City University of New York (CUNY) system as a premier performer. Four of the top five performing schools on the mobility index with at least 300 students in their cohort were schools in the CUNY system. The fifth was California State University, Los Angeles, another second-tier school.
Access and success
Because the mobility measures both access and success, a low score could mean either that the school admitted very few low-income students (access rating), or that it did not turn very many of those into high-wage earners (success rating).
In Utah, the lowest low-income access rating went to BYU, with just 2.2 percent. The highest access rating, at 7 percent, was Southern Utah University. But SUU's mobility index was a comparatively low 1 percent, meaning relatively few of those low-income students went on to earn high wages.
The highest success ratings in Utah went to the University of Utah at 30.7 and BYU at 29.6.
With a 4.1 access rating, BYU-Idaho, BYU's sister school, nearly doubles the flagship Provo campus' weak low-income access rate. But BYU-Idaho's success rating lags behind at 18.2 percent.
BYU-Provo has a distinctive challenge on the access front in that it is more academically selective than surrounding public schools. BYU's average ACT score is 29, with the University of Utah next highest in the state at 24.
To address access, BYU conducts a summer program, Summer of Academic Refinement, which helps high school students, many from less privileged backgrounds, navigate college preparation and admissions, according to BYU spokesman Todd Hollingshead.
BYU also takes family circumstances into account in its admissions process, which seeks qualified "students of various talents and backgrounds, including geographic, educational, cultural, ethnic and racial" and states that "a mix of students who share values based on the gospel of Jesus Christ and come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences is an important educational asset to BYU.”
The state's public colleges and universities also have an eye on the economic mobility of their students. The state system is in the second year of a five-year plan that aims, among other objectives, to boost college attendance from 66 percent to 75 percent of high school seniors, according to Melanie Heath, director of communications for the Utah System of Higher Education.
A key part of this program is Step Up to Higher Education, which provides resources for high school guidance counselors and reaches out to high school students who may not otherwise pursue college.
Utah also has work to do on college completion, Heath notes. A 2015 report by the Lumina Foundation ranked Utah fourth in the percentage of working age adults with "some college but no degree." Closing the completion gap, Heath suggests, could be a key to improving mobility.
Finding the Holy Grail
Elsewhere in the country, some encouraging results offer more questions than answers. Glendale Community College in Southern California had an impressive 7.1 percent mobility score, for example, though it is only a two-year school.
The key question now, Flamang said, is to figure out what Glendale CC is doing right. "Our goals is to identify high performing schools," he said, "and then see what they are doing to outperform others. We hope to engage other researchers on this."
The data compiled here is getting very close to the Holy Grail of education research into how colleges can break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Researchers have long argued that better data is central to discovering not only which schools are doing the best on this front, but also which programs within those schools are carrying the load. Even the most successful school, they know, has within its walls some majors that perform and others that do not.
For years, researchers have pressed for the release of "de-identified" data that would allow them to better inform parents and improve programs. For a variety of reasons, colleges and universities have fought this pressure, and so far the federal government has prevented researchers from connecting the dots.
While this new mobility report does not break down to program level within schools, it does represent a huge leap forward, said Tamara Hiler, an education policy researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Third Way.
"The data they were able to collect is incredibly fascinating and useful," Hiler said. "Too much of this data is obscure, and we need to have more of this information publicly available."
Hiler said this data should help focus attention on how to encourage more schools to provide more access to low-income students, as well as the recipe for the secret sauce at Glendale Community College that pushes them to success.
"It's not just the Ivy Leagues that are providing mobility to low-income students," Hiler said. One key take away, she suggests, is that more federal dollars need to be focused on these "mobility machines."