Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility

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 mobilitythe 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.

The Effects of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on the Educational Outcomes of Undocumented Students

“…Recent studies have highlighted the role that many public universities play in providing access and opportunities for social mobility to low-income students (Chetty et al 2017). These types of institutions have the potential to offer similar access and opportunities to undocumented youth.…”

Learning Better: Public Policy for Skills Development

“…If Latin American and Caribbean countries want to catch up to more developed economies in terms of wealth, they first need to boost the skills levels of individuals entering the labor market. And if they want to increase income mobility, they need to enhance the skills-and the opportunity to acquire those skills-of all their citizens, including children born into lowincome households (Solon, 1992;Chetty et al, 2017).…”

“…If Latin American and Caribbean countries want to catch up to more developed economies in terms of wealth, they first need to boost the skills levels of individuals entering the labor market. And if they want to increase income mobility, they need to enhance the skills-and the opportunity to acquire those skills-of all their citizens, including children born into lowincome households (Solon, 1992;Chetty et al, 2017).When discussing skills accumulation in the region, it is useful to lay out a simple production function of skills and examine its different inputs: (i) the individual's stock of skills; (ii) the time and effort devoted to learning; (iii) the private financial resources spent by households and firms in skills development; and (iv) public spending on education and job training. The goal is to look at these inputs and at different skill measures separately, document socioeconomic gradients in skills, and set the stage for the rest of the book to design sounder public policy for skills formation.…”

The Role of Universities in Intergenerational Social Mobility: Examining Mobility at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil

“…Using administrative data for incoming students, we explore patterns of intergenerational mobility by comparing the family income at the time of matriculation with later young adult earnings. Our analysis explores whether mobility at UFPE, as measured for cohorts matriculating in [2005][2006], aligns with the conventional perception of little mobility at elite public flagship universities 3 or whether the observed mobility is more aligned with that measured in U.S. universities by Chetty et al 2017. …”