Figuring out the best colleges is big business. College rankings stay in the headlines for weeks after each release, and schools proudly tout their positions among their peers in marketing material.
It’s simple enough to figure out which schools produce the highest-paid graduates — federal data can provide that easily.
Arguably one of the most important metrics has been more elusive: Which colleges and universities increase upward mobility for the students who need it most, those who come from low-income backgrounds or ethnic groups that are underrepresented in higher education?
Obviously degrees from highly selective universities like Harvard and MIT are going to boost students’ earning potential. But which institutions are both enrolling and increasing earnings for low-income and underrepresented students in their respective regions around the country?
That’s what analysts from the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education set out to measure when they began developing a scoring system that identifies higher ed campuses that are helping students in their regions become upwardly mobile. They released the Student Access and Earnings Classification earlier this year.
The heavyweight schools according to this new scale of measurement may surprise you.
The Problem of Geography
The nonprofits decided in 2022 that it was time to update the 50-year-old Carnegie classification system, which describes colleges and universities, to include a designation on how well schools support upward mobility. It would create a way for researchers and the institutions to gauge how schools were performing compared to their peer institutions.
The problem was that researchers did not have good data on where students started economically prior to entering college or their social success afterward, explains Kyle Whitman, the chief data scientist for Carnegie.
Using available federal data, Whitman and his colleagues set out to find a way to capture just that.
What they wanted to know was twofold, both measures based on where a college or university’s students came from. First, how did the share of low-income and ethnic minority students at the university compare to the makeup of the communities students came from? Second, how did students’ earnings compare to median salaries in their regions eight years after they started college?
“We spent a couple years and a lot of versions to see what made sense and what didn’t make sense, and I think we created something that pushes the envelope and reframes these issues in a way that pushes competition,” Whitman says.
Whitman says that measuring both enrollment and salary relative to geography sets the new Student Access and Earnings Classification apart from other methods of comparing colleges.
“So many other projects don’t consider geography at all and think of colleges and universities as existing in the same type of place,” he says, “which is to say they don’t exist in any place. They’re just in this abstract United States where New York is the same as Kansas City is the same as rural Idaho, and we just know that that’s not true in any way. And so we try to build geography into this at every single place that we could.”
Scores That Makes Sense
Each college or university is scored on student access and earnings from 0 or higher.
Scoring a 1 in access means that the school is enrolling low-income and minority students at the rate that would be expected based on the geographic areas that students come from, Whitman explains. A score of 1 in earnings likewise means that students are earning the median salary in their region.
This scoring system allows the viewer to better judge how a college or university is performing in both categories, Whitman says, by adding context that is unique to each school.
For a university like MIT, which attracts undergrads from all over the world, Whitman says researchers used the top three states where their students come from to create a weighted average for what the institution’s Pell recipients, underrepresented student rate, and earnings should be.
For example, if 20 percent of students in the region served by a college are eligible for Pell Grants, then it would be impressive to learn that the college’s student body was 40 percent Pell recipients. But if 80 percent of area students were Pell-eligible, then an enrollment of 40 percent Pell recipients would be considered falling short on the part of the college.
“We’re able to understand and contextualize whether that 40 percent is actually phenomenal,” Whitman explains, “or on the flip side, if they’re enrolling 40 percent Pell eligible students but serving areas where we think that that percent should actually be much higher, we’re able to then identify, ‘Actually, that’s not a good thing.’”
For regional universities or community colleges, the analysis tapped their metro-area data instead.
Take the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, for instance, which is considered a regional school and draws many of its students from four counties in South Texas. The new Carnegie Classification creates its weighted averages for that university using city-level data rather than state-wide figures.
“So we’re able to come up with a more unique and customized version of the analysis,” Whitman says, “that really acknowledges that many colleges and universities are not designed or set up or funded to serve the entire state that they are located in — but instead a smaller community.”
The Student Access and Earnings Classification also controls for differences in earnings based on race and gender, Whitman says.
‘Opportunity’ Schools
The shining stars of this new classification are dubbed the “Opportunity Colleges and Universities,” which score at least a 1 in access and above-average earnings for low-income and racial minority students. That’s at least a 1.5 score in earnings for four-year institutions, which means those students are earning 50 percent higher than median pay expected for their geographic area. Two-year colleges need an earnings score of 1.25, or 25 percent above the median wages.
Whitman says these measures reveal the extent to which colleges and universities around the country, not only the biggest or most prestigious institutions, are helping students gain upward mobility.
“Those schools that I’ve never heard of before that get to be an Opportunity College, those excite me, because that’s exactly why we want to dig into these cases, and to see what is [the college] doing that we don’t know,” he adds. “We want to identify the outcomes of those efforts and then see what they are, and then maybe those can be spread to other schools.”
Several campuses of Chamberlain University, a nursing school, made it to the “opportunity” bracket, alongside Howard University and Michigan’s Ferris State University. Fourteen tribal colleges and universities also earned the designation, including Aaniiih Nakoda College in Montana and Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas.
“Stanford’s always going to look good, MIT is always going to look good,” he says. “I think what we’re able to do is to just widen the aperture of who we consider ‘doing well’ and to see schools that just had no visibility in previous projects because they exist in areas where the cost of living is less. That should not be something that they’re punished for.”
Whitman was surprised to see how many tribal colleges popped up in the “opportunity” category, but it’s the type of data the new measures were designed to uncover.
“I think the way that we’ve created this methodology, it’s leveled the playing field in the way that it needed to be leveled,” he says, “so that we can see cases like these tribal colleges and universities and recognize them for how well they are doing.”
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