News Item
"MarketWatch" featured Pace University in "These 10 solid U.S. colleges prove you don’t need Harvard or Yale to achieve the American Dream"
For years we’ve heard about how Americans’ upward mobility is broken and middle-class income has stagnated.
The data backs it up, which is probably why the percentage of 30-year-olds in the U.S. earning more than their parents did at the same age is plummeting.
Policymakers have failed to address this wealth, income, and opportunity gap, but some institutions of higher learning are taking up the slack. A recent study by a team of academic superstars including Harvard University’s Raj Chetty and the University of California at Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez — a frequent collaborator of French economist Thomas Piketty, whose idea of a wealth tax inspired Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — has identified the U.S. colleges and universities that best promote upward mobility.
That study, which assigned hundreds of U.S. universities a score for their success at moving its graduates up the income scale, is posted in several formats on a splashy website, along with a link to an interactive tool from The New York Times that allows you to see how your favorite college rates.
The researchers found that highly selective colleges and universities such as Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, and Swarthmore (which I attended as a first-generation college student) actually do a very good job of elevating lower-income kids to the middle-class and beyond. But they take so few kids from the bottom 20% — less than 4% of enrollment — they can’t move the needle much.
Good state and local universities, however, can and do. That’s why they dominate the list of the 10 colleges that are most effective in helping their graduates move from the lowest 20% (family incomes below $25,000 a year) to the top 20% ($110,000 and above). That’s the stuff of Horatio Alger stories, yet it happens all the time at these American Dream machines.
Two of the top 10 — Pace and St. John’s — are private. Only Stony Brook University (of the State University of New York) cracks U.S. News & World Report’s top 100 national universities rankings for 2020. ”The colleges that have the highest bottom-to-top-quintile mobility rates.” the study’s authors write, “are typically mid-tier public institutions” — colleges the kids of entitled parents like Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin would avoid at any cost. All of these 10 schools are located in California, New York, and Texas.
Read the full article.
