New research suggests that while college access for lower-income students is limited at many universities, lower-income students who are accepted and graduate are often just as successful later in life as their wealthier classmates.

The study, conducted by economists with the Equality of Opportunity Project, gathered data from 30 million students who attended Title-IV accredited colleges in the United States between 1999 and 2013. It created mobility report cards that show students’ income backgrounds and the earnings they make when they reach their 30s.

Within each institution, students across the socioeconomic spectrum had similar chances of success after college, the study found.

“Their life outcomes, in terms of the income that they make, are pretty similar,” said Carl McPherson, a pre-doctoral research fellow with the Equality of Opportunity Project who assisted the principal investigators with the study. “If you’re rich, you’re much more likely to go to a better school. But once you get to your school, it doesn’t matter who your parents were.”

The data from the study also shows, though, that colleges are not as economically diverse as previously thought.

“Income segregation across colleges in the U.S. is about the same as income segregation across neighborhoods in the average American city,” McPherson said.

Students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution in the U.S. were 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League institutions than their peers from the bottom quintile, he added.

For the study, researchers calculated colleges’ mobility rates by multiplying the percentage of students at the college who came from the bottom income quintile by the percentage of those lower-income students who reached the top quintile after graduation.

“It’s not a coincidence that most of the schools that don’t look very good on these measures are expensive, elite private universities,” said Ross Rubenstein, a professor and the Dan E. Sweat Distinguished Chair in Educational and Community at Georgia State University.

Ivy League schools and other elite private institutions had lower mobility rates than what the study calls “middle-tier” public universities, such as State University of New York Stony Brook and several of the California State and City University of New York campuses.

Although Ivy League institutions and other elite schools put more of the low-income students they accept into the top 1 percent after graduation than other schools, they often admit more students from families in the top 1 percent of the income distribution in the U.S. than students in the bottom 60 percent of the income distribution, giving them low mobility rates.

Schools such as Stony Brook admitted far more low-income students than Ivy Leagues did, and at the same time, gave those students almost the same chance at reaching the top quintile as the more elite schools, McPherson said.

Rubenstein said many colleges aren’t doing enough to spur economic mobility because they are not accepting many students from lower income backgrounds. Both he and McPherson emphasized that they believe much remains to be done to ensure lower-income students have equal opportunities to attend college and move up the socioeconomic scale.

“We hope that people can figure out what these (middle-tier public) schools are doing right so they can increase access for lower-income students and so that other schools can increase success rates,” McPherson said.

Published on February 1, 2017 at 8:18 pm

Contact Madeleine: mdavison@syr.edu