Digging into data helps lift kids out of poverty

hard and secure a better life than their parents by climbing the economic ladder. In 1940, the promise of the American Dream was all but a foregone conclusion — some 92 percent of children grew up to earn more than their parents. Today, those odds are no better than a coin flip, an astonishingly precipitous decline.

Families nationwide are feeling the same economic pinch that Ohio knows all too well.

My colleagues and I believe the American Dream can be revitalized by harnessing the power of big data. As is true in precision medicine, social scientists and local stakeholders armed with data can customize solutions for the particular social challenges many communities confront.

Over time we can increase upward mobility by creating scalable and efficient policies that incubate locally and can then be widely replicated. We all have to think creatively about how to boost social and financial mobility, especially for the poor. Higher education research we have conducted is emblematic of how we approach these questions.

Most Americans agree that a college degree helps people move up the economic ladder. But many people are surprised to learn that our research proves access to higher education is a larger mobility driver than graduation rates alone. Once enrolled in a given college, students from lowand high-income families go on to have very similar earnings.

We have partnered with a diverse array of American colleges and universities — including Ohio State University and Shawnee State University — to address this challenge scientifically.

We created an initiative called the Collegiate Leaders in Increasing MoBility, or CLIMB, to help university administrators increase the number of low-income students who matriculate at American universities and boost the share who ultimately graduate and join the middle class.

Our research explains why some colleges succeed as engines of mobility — and, more important, how and why the majority of them still do not.

We have found that America’s community colleges and state university systems — many of which have raised prices and reduced offerings to accommodate funding cuts — are integral to the American Dream.

One example is Manhattan’s City College, part of the CUNY system, where more than threequarters of students who enrolled in the late 1990s and who grew up in families with bottom quintile incomes are now earning salaries that place them in the top threefifths of incomes nationwide. When evaluating their own admissions and financial aid policies, administrators from Ohio’s colleges and universities should consider the impressive precedent set by CUNY.

Increasing access to higher education, however, is not enough. A young person’s neighborhood dramatically shapes his prospects as an adult. Every extra year a child spends in a better environment improves a broad range of his adult outcomes, including college attendance.

This trend can be seen across Ohio. Children who grew up in low-income families — defined as the 25th percentile of the national income distribution — in Cleveland and Columbus earned an average of $20,200 and $20,900 by age 26. (Low-income children from Cincinnati did slightly better, earning an average of $23,000.)

Cross state lines into Pittsburgh and children from similar economic backgrounds grew up to earn an average $28,000 — 38 percent more than their peers in Cleveland.

Our theory is that once policymakers have been armed with such tailored, census tract-level mobility data, they will be empowered to more effectively govern and attack poverty. Early results are promising, which is good news. All of us will benefit if society does more to lift more children out of poverty.