College and Opportunity

FROM MIRIAM

Dylan Matthews at Vox:

If you sort schools by their overall mobility rate — the access they provide to poor students, multiplied by their success in economically advancing those students — the top 10 looks unlike any US News ranking you’ve ever seen:

Equality of Opportunity Project

None of these are uber-selective Ivies or Ivy-adjacents like Stanford or MIT. Pace and Stony Brook are probably the most selective of the bunch, and they’re substantially less selective than US News’s top schools. Instead you get a list of what the New York Times’s David Leonhardt dubs “America’s great working-class colleges.”
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There’s also more research to be done on what would happen if schools with high success rates but low access — schools like Claremont McKenna or the Ivy League — started letting in dramatically more poor students. Perhaps those schools are so effective at helping the poor students they do get because of networking effects (they meet rich students, who help them out) that would go away if the student body became more representative of the country.

But the preliminary data suggests that’s not true, and that these schools could enroll many more poor kids than they do with little ill effect. “At all institutions, kids from poor families and rich families have very similar outcomes,” Friedman notes. You wouldn’t expect that if poor kids are just riding on rich kids’ coattails. Also, the authors examined schools where the share of poor kids enrolled rose over time (most notably Harvard, which saw a big jump in low-income enrollment between 1998 and 2002), and checked to see if they became less successful at elevating those kids economically. The answer was … not really.

Preston Cooper at Forbes:

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once observed that nothing is permanent, except change. Such classical wisdom is once again evident in a recent release of data from the National Center for Education Statistics on the college enrollment patterns of recent high school graduates. Since 1975, when recordkeeping began, a student’s chance of enrolling in college rose reliably with his family’s income. No longer. Low-income students now enroll in college at a higher rate than their middle-income peers.

Source: NCES Digest of Education Statistics, Table 302.30. Lines show three-year moving averages for... [+]

 PRESTON COOPER/FORBES

Roughly 70% of students who graduate high school enroll in a college (either two-year or four-year) the following autumn, according to the most recent data. Wealthy students enroll in college at the highest rate, with 83% of recent high school graduates in the top quintile of the income distribution going on to college.

But below the top quintile, reality diverges from the patterns one might expect. Among students in the bottom income quintile, that college-enrollment rate is 67%, compared to 64% for students from the middle three quintiles. While the difference is still within the margin of error, it marks an undeniable reversal of the historical norm.

Bridget Burns at The Washington Post:

As a nation, we need to know which colleges are serving low-income students well. The goal should not be to praise or shame, but to find out what’s working and then replicate it. Here are three ways we can start measuring what we truly care about:

1. Publicize measures of low-income student progress to identify those schools that graduate large numbers and percentages of low-income students. Colleges know this information already, but do not share it publicly.

2. Develop rankings that highlight and reward the kind of behavior our country needs more of. Rankings might, for example, showcase universities that admit and graduate (in four and six years) the highest number and highest percentage of low-income students. Or they might shine a light on universities with the smallest gap in performance between low-income students and the rest of the student population. There is room for optimism here, as ranking organizations increasingly take into account graduation rates, Pell rates and student satisfaction.

3. Make sure that awards and accolades for serving low-income students reward scale, not exclusivity. Yes, we want elite institutions and small liberal arts colleges to serve low-income students, and we should applaud their efforts to do so. But they serve relatively small numbers of students. We have to find ways to deliver high-quality degrees at the scale our country needs, which means more emphasis on large universities and less on the Ivies.