Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility

Paper: Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility

Author: Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, Danny Yagan

Source: The Equality of Opportunity Project

In their recently updated working paper, Mobility Report Cards: the Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility, authors Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan analyze the role colleges play in upward income mobility. The analysis uses estimates of students’ earnings in their early thirties and their parents’ income for each institution of higher education in the United States. According to the findings of their analysis, income segregation across institutions is comparable to that across neighborhoods in American cities. In addition, the authors find little evidence that students from low-income backgrounds are “mismatched” at selective institutions. They further find that mobility varies across institutions.

The authors’ revised working paper can be found here along with accompanying fact sheet, non-technical summary, data and interactive tool to explore the data.

To learn more, please see The Equality of Opportunity Project website.