Interesting new research:
Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational
Mobility by Chetty, R., et al.
Abstract
We characterize
intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using
data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013. We document four
results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For
example, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution
are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose
parents are in the bottom income quintile. Second, children from low- and
high-income families have similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college
they attend, indicating that low-income students are not mismatched at
selective colleges. Third, rates of upward mobility – the fraction of students
who come from families in the bottom income quintile and reach the top quintile
– differ substantially across colleges because low-income access varies
significantly across colleges with similar earnings outcomes. Rates of
bottom-to-top quintile mobility are highest at certain mid-tier public
universities, such as the City University of New York and California State
colleges. Rates of upper-tail (bottom quintile to top 1%) mobility are highest
at elite colleges, such as Ivy League universities. Fourth, the fraction of
students from low-income families did not change substantially between
2000-2011 at elite private colleges, but fell sharply at colleges with the
highest rates of bottom-to-top-quintile mobility. Although our descriptive
analysis does not identify colleges’ causal effects on students’ outcomes, the
publicly available statistics constructed here highlight colleges that deserve
further study as potential engines of upward mobility.
Related article by Lawrence Summers: