Colleges and equal opportunity

We are often told that education is the key to upward mobility and even a tool for reducing inequality. In that, certainly colleges play a role. But, which college should you choose if you want to move up? There are many tools available to students and parents, and some of the best ones are new.

One tool that has long been used is College Navigator, maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics. Using data provided by colleges to the Department of Education, this web site allows students and parents to search among colleges using a variety of indicators, from demographics to financial aid to graduation rates. (By way of disclosure, the data used on College Navigator comes from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). I have been responsible for the submission of IPEDS data for Porterville College for about the last 15 years and for all three colleges in our district for the past few.)

Another tool using IPEDS and other data is the College Scorecard. This system provides simple data on colleges across the country on graduation rates, cost of attendance, earnings after graduation, student loan debt, and a handful of other metrics.

But, some would like to go further. What if you are a poor student and you want to give yourself the best chance at improving your income potential. Which college would you choose?

Stanford economist Raj Chetty recently set out to answer this question and others with the Equality of Opportunity Project. Using data from colleges and millions of tax records, he compiled rankings of where each college stood in helping its students achieve upward mobility.

First perhaps we should define terms. Take students and divide them into quintiles based on parental income. If we were to achieve perfect equality of opportunity, the bottom quintile — that 20 percent of students whose parents have the lowest incomes — would have the same chance as the students in the top quintile of achieving high pay as adults.

For colleges to get them there, they must do two things: they must admit those students and they must graduate them. Some colleges are better at one than the other.

For example, Chetty’s own university, and my graduate alma mater, Stanford, does an excellent job having its students graduate. Their graduation rates are among the highest in the country, including for their lower income students.

But, that rate doesn’t matter so much if few of those students get in. In fact, just 9.4 percent of Stanford students come from the bottom two quintiles of income groups. Less than a quarter of what perfect equality would be.

What’s more, more than 17 percent of Stanford students come from the top 1 percent in parental income. And the lowest three quartiles of income — three fifths of the population — contributed only a slightly higher percentage of students to Stanford, 18.6 percent.

Think Stanford is the worst? Think again. At 38 colleges across the country, there are more students from the top 1 percent of parental income than from the bottom 60 percent.

Other colleges come a bit closer. At our two local universities, the California State Universities in Bakersfield and Fresno, graduation rates aren’t quite as high, but poor students are much more likely to get in. And the graduation rates are in the respectable range.

To calculate an overall rate, you need to look at both sides of the equation: whether poor students can get in and how well they do once they get there. Chetty calculates a simple metric: the percentage of students from the lowest 40 percent of parental income who get into the top 40 percent of the income scale. This is the mobility rate.

So, while Stanford had a mobility rate of 7 percent, both of the Cal-state schools did better, 18.7 percent for Fresno and 20.7 percent for Bakersfield.

Does that mean you should choose a CSU school over an elite one? Not necessarily. For students and parents, the issue is far more complicated than that.

But what these data do show is that if we are to achieve improved economic mobility, many colleges have some work to do. Some need to find ways of improving their admission rates of poor students and some need to better support them when they do enroll.

The New York Times has a web page with interactive graphics where you can look up colleges using Chetty’s data.