Low-income students could have a better shot at upward mobility if they had greater access to more colleges with a record of good student outcomes, but “income segregation” is getting in the way, several scholars argue in a new study released Monday.
Titled “Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility,” the study found that children from both poor and affluent families ended up with “very similar earnings” based on the college they attended.
For instance, when you look at college students from different socioeconomic backgrounds in the United States as a whole, those from the highest-income families end up 30 percentiles higher in the earnings distribution than those from the lowest income families, the paper states.
However, the situation changes when students from the lowest- and highest-income families attend the nation’s top colleges — the difference in their earnings drops to only 7.2 percentiles, or 76 percent less than what it is at the national level. Income gaps among graduates from lower-ranked colleges are also relatively small, the paper states.
“The small gap in earnings outcomes between students from high- vs. low-income families within each college shows that most colleges successfully ‘level the playing field’ across students with different socioeconomic backgrounds, either because they select children of relatively uniform ability or because they provide greater “value-added” for children from low-income families,” the paper argues.
Regardless of which of those two mechanisms is employed, the results suggest that students from low-income families are not in over their heads academically or “mismatched” at selective colleges, the paper argues.
The problem is low-income students are not being admitted to the nation’s selective universities at a rate that is on par with their more affluent counterparts — a form of “income segregation” that the scholars argue is “comparable to the degree of income segregation across neighborhoods in the average American city.”
