By Andrew J. Seligsohn, Ph.D
In the last few years, researchers and education leaders have increased their focus on the role of higher education in advancing economic mobility. Organizations such as Opportunity Insights and Third Way have published ratings of institutions based on the degree to which they promote economic mobility for low-income students, and the new Carnegie Student Access and Earnings Classification provides insight into every institution’s performance.
At Public Agenda, we welcomed this development because we believe a healthy democracy requires a higher education sector that creates real pathways to opportunity for everyone willing to invest their time and effort. We also saw a chance to fill a gap: while it’s great to know which institutions are doing an effective job, improving the sector’s overall performance—and thus the fairness of the country—requires knowing how high performers are doing it. Most people go to a college close to where they live, so our collective goal should be to ensure that everyone has an economic mobility engine around the corner. We sought to contribute by providing a window into successful institutions so others can learn from that success.
To that end, we conducted case studies of 18 institutions that enroll large numbers of low-income students, keep the cost of education low for those students, and achieve relatively high earnings among those students. Most of those institutions are Carnegie Opportunity Colleges and Universities (OCUs). Our case study research included site visits; interviews with hundreds of senior leaders, institutional researchers, faculty, and student-facing staff; and focus groups with students and alumni. We complemented that qualitative work with a quantitative study based on an original dataset including all two- and four-year colleges and universities in the country.
You can find all of the products of that research here on our website, including the case studies themselves, a report on the quantitative findings, a summary of the key themes from the project, and planning tools to get your institution moving in a positive direction. In this space, we share just a few observations about what matters most.
The most important takeaway is that colleges and universities become strong economic mobility performers not by chance but by committing to mobility as a core purpose of the institution. When Guy Bailey was named the inaugural president of the newly formed University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, he recognized that the students and families of the region needed one thing: opportunity. Every design decision was evaluated through the lens of success and mobility for low-income students. The result is a Carnegie OCU that shows up near the top of nearly every mobility rating. The same pattern held at older institutions that had not always produced great mobility outcomes: a deep commitment to change led to dramatic improvements.
The second takeaway is that the heroes of the mobility stories don’t all have the same title. At some institutions, a president with a clear vision played a huge role in the story. When Tomas Morales joined California State University-San Bernardino as president in 2021, improving opportunity for low-income residents of the Inland Empire was his North Star, and he knew from prior experience that doing so would require building strong partnerships with K-12 school districts, community colleges, other universities, and youth-serving organizations. Together with these partners, CSUSB created a region in which many more students were well prepared to succeed in college and had the support they needed to do so. Now these same partners are working together to increase post-graduation opportunities in the region to ensure that more graduates stay close to home and contribute to long-term economic success.
Just about an hour to the west, a very different mobility story unfolded, and it took us a while to piece it together. No one at California State University-Los Angeles could point to a single person or moment that defined the commitment to opportunity for low-income students. In fact, many at the university were surprised to learn that their university was in any way special. When we told them about the data showing that it was, they began telling us about some key people who had gotten the ball rolling. We learned about Catherine Haras, executive director of the Center for Effective Teaching and Learning. We heard how her center became a home base where inspired faculty members such as Professor of Chemistry Krishna Foster could develop their own skills and engage colleagues in learning how to be maximally effective as teachers and mentors for the students from East LA’s low-income communities who make up most of the student population at CSULA. We heard how a culture grew across the faculty and staff until it defined the institution, regardless of who occupied the president’s office.
A third takeaway is that the institutions having the greatest success in supporting low-income students are places where staff and faculty members across the institution can have substantial influence if they have good ideas about how to improve outcomes for low-income students. At Houston City College, we heard from the institutional research team about how their talents are leveraged to support decision-making about issues such as where to locate programs to create the greatest opportunities for students. At Lamar University, we heard from advisors who could trigger the creation of new course sections as soon as they saw barriers emerging for registering students. At the University of Illinois Chicago, we learned about systematic experiments with ideas generated by staff and faculty members about how to improve retention and success. Everywhere we went, we heard from student-facing staff and faculty that their perspectives were taken seriously by senior leaders.
With the multitude of challenges facing higher education, campuses can be tough places to work right now. Perhaps the most important observation we can offer is that the institutions we visited are full of people who feel tremendous satisfaction in their jobs because they know they are making the difference they came there to make. We were inspired by the work we saw and its impact on individuals and communities. If you would like to explore how our findings could be useful to your campus, we invite you to reach out.
Andrew Seligsohn is the president of Public Agenda