College and university leaders, faculty, funders, and policymakers routinely and rightly cite social and economic mobility as a core goal. Unfortunately, existing data and analyses often fail to account for the distinct missions, unique student populations, and complex operating environments of institutions. These gaps make it difficult for higher education leaders and stakeholders to understand how effectively schools are leveling the playing field and achieving their social and economic mobility goals.
The American Council on Education (ACE) began developing the Social and Economic Mobility Classification for the Carnegie Classifications of Higher Education in late 2022 to create better data on mobility and incentivize colleges and universities to focus on increasing learner outcomes and expanding access to students, especially those who have been underserved.
This blog post will describe how we have structured our time since starting our work, what we have learned about social and economic mobility, and what we have ahead as we target the release of the new classification in early 2025.
Building a New Classification
Soon after announcing that ACE would lead the reimagining of the Carnegie Classifications of Higher Education, ACE and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching determined foundational parameters and objectives that the Social and Economic Mobility Classification must operate within and fulfill. These include:
- Universality: the methodology must be able to produce a classification result for every institution in the United States that enrolls degree-seeking students.
- Relevancy to stakeholders: the classification must be relevant to students/families and public decisionmakers as well as researchers. Accordingly, the classification should observe at the institution-level rather than the field/major level.
- Simplicity, transparency, and replicability: the methodology must be clear, intuitive, and simple. The results must be reproducible by any interested party.
- Collaboration for better data: The project must create a classification in the near-term with existing data while working with external data providers to produce enhanced future classifications.
ACE convened a technical review panel in September 2022 to guide the design of the new classification. Given the clean-sheet opportunity, the TRP began its work by exploring the philosophical, historical, and theoretical underpinnings of concepts that could be built into the classification. We covered the concepts of social and economic mobility; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and identifying institutional environments that schools create to enable student access and success.
The TRP reviewed existing projects in the social and economic mobility space. This included high-quality studies of intergenerational economic mobility and return-on-investment/value of colleges and universities along with other projects that blend a variety of measures into a composite score of mobility. We also took stock of existing data and explored future data that could be used in the project.
While doing this work, we quickly started to form ideas of what we could build into the classification to ensure that it offers new insights to the field rather than duplicates existing approaches and results (particularly the ROI and intergenerational mobility studies). Over the course of the past year, these ideas have evolved into exploratory analyses, then working models, and now into an increasingly cohesive analytical approach.
Lessons Learned on Social and Economic Mobility
The work of the TRP so far has yielded several insights:
- Although social and economic mobility are distinct concepts, social mobility is often conflated with economic mobility because of the significant measurement challenges associated with social mobility.
- The social and economic mobility produced by a school for its students is a product of not only the educational environment of that school, but also the fields of degrees offered by the school; the geography of where students originate and where they end up after attendance; and the interaction of the labor market with student characteristics such as race/ethnicity, sex, and age.
- Most mobility projects ignore the role of institutional environments, geography, and student body composition. These are complex and important factors. For example, geography affects the pool of potential students available to a school as well as the subsequent opportunities available to students after they leave the school. Not considering the demographics of the student body means ignoring the presence of systemic injustices in education and economic systems. This ultimately punishes schools that offer access to students who face challenges in the labor market through no fault of their own.
Next Steps
We are continuing to develop the methodology for the Social and Economic Mobility Classification around the insights of the TRP, and we will share more details about the methodological approach later this spring for feedback and engagement. At that time, we will also share the first set of eight papers in a new series of white papers on issues of higher education classification and methodological decisions related to the upcoming versions of the Carnegie Classifications.
Overall, we will continue to share updates about the project as we finalize our methodological approach this fall and publish the new classification in early 2025. The Social and Economic Mobility Classification will complement not only other frameworks for measuring mobility at institutions but will enhance the broader Carnegie Classifications by providing a new, student-centered lens. We look forward to the insights this new classification will bring to light.
