When the Carnegie Classifications introduced the Student Access and Earnings Classification, we set out to more fully explore what plenty of research has already shown: higher education is a reliable engine of social and economic mobility for students nationwide.
A few frameworks currently exist to measure the value of higher education and its return on investment; however, the Student Access and Earnings Classification is unique among similar tools in the field. Initially created to measure social and economic mobility, this classification aims to assess the extent to which institutions act as springboards to better lives for their students.
To investigate this central theme, our methodology considers two separate dimensions: whether institutions enroll students who reflect the communities they serve—what we consider access—and whether those students go on to earn competitive wages compared to peers in their area—also known as earnings.
This blog, the first in a two-part series that explores both dimensions, takes a closer look at access—why we measure it, how we measure it, and what we’ve learned about so far.
Let’s start with why and how we measure access.
The higher education experience starts with a letter of acceptance. Before students can reap the benefits of a college education, they first need to get in.
But for low-income students and those from racially diverse backgrounds, college access can be uneven. Oftentimes, the people for whom a higher education would be most beneficial are the same people who are excluded from the experience.
With that in mind, we do not consider selectivity the same as access—an institution could accept 100% of the students that apply, but if those students only represent part of the larger community, we do not consider that highly accessible.
Our specific goal is to understand whether the student population at a specific institution reflects the demographics of the places that institution serves, focusing on identifying colleges that are granting access to students who often face barriers to entry and are underrepresented in U.S. higher education. That is an essential part of the classification, and it aims to help us better understand institutions’ role in expanding opportunity for students instead of preserving it for those already likely to attain a college degree.
There is no perfect way to measure access. There is, however, enough publicly available, universal information that allows us to explore how well institutions are providing access to students from low-income and racially diverse backgrounds.
To that end, we use two data sources to measure access:
- Undergraduate students who receive Pell Grants, and
- Undergraduate students from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups.
We contextualize that data for each school based on the demographics of the population for the areas each institution serves. Depending on the location its students are coming from, the institution may have a higher or lower percentage of students who are expected to come from those groups. This helps us to more accurately measure whether the students that an institution enrolls fully reflect the places it serves.
How can measuring access drive student success?
By measuring access, we are providing the field with a benchmarking tool that can help researchers, policymakers, and institutional leaders examine how campuses are serving students and their community, where patterns diverge across different institutions, and what those differences may reveal about policy, practice, and incentives across the field.
Over time, we hope the insights uncovered by the Student Access and Earnings Classification will help institutions make decisions that focus on expanding access and delivering stronger outcomes for students.
What have we learned so far?
The vast majority of colleges that primarily award associate degrees (91%) and about three-quarters of colleges that offer a bachelor’s degree or above (76%) are providing higher than expected access to students from lower-income and underrepresented racial populations. You can use our visualization tool to learn more about these institutions and the level of access institutions are offering.
Additionally, 478 schools have been named Opportunity Colleges and Universities (OCUs), a designation that pushes back on a long-standing assumption: that serving more lower-income students and more racially diverse students will result in lower outcomes. Our analysis shows otherwise. OCUs are distinguishing themselves by both providing high access and showing strong earnings outcomes for students, offering concrete examples of how colleges and universities can expand opportunity without compromising student success.
We also see differences in access across peer groups (Institutional Classifications) as well as places where access may be similar but earnings outcomes are different. Those are places we want to study further.
The Student Access and Earnings Classification is about measuring what matters: whether students are benefitting from the promise of higher education, especially those who have the most to gain from going to college.
Access is an essential dimension of this framework—it is the foundation of opportunity and a gateway to long-term success. We’ll unpack the second dimension—earnings—in our next post.