Lincoln University has been ranked No. 1 among all four-year universities in Pennsylvania for student mobility according to a new study.
The mobility rate is the percentage of students who come from families in the bottom fifth of incomes and end up in the top fifth of incomes.
On the list of more than 2,200 colleges, in Pennsylvania among four-year schools ranked highest for mobility are (in order): Lincoln, University of the Sciences, Drexel, and Temple.
Each school’s mobility rate is based on several factors: access, or the fraction of its students who come from families in the bottom fifth; and success rate, or the fraction of such students who reach the top fifth.
While Ivy League schools have the highest success rate, the study shows that less selective schools have comparable success rates to Ivy League schools while offering much higher levels of access to low-income families.
The study, called The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility and published in July 2017 by the Equality of Opportunity Project, analyzes the role of colleges in upward income mobility by constructing publicly available mobility report cards — estimates of students’ earnings in their early thirties and their parents’ incomes — for each college in America.
The study uses de-identified data from the federal government covering all college students from 1999- 2013, building on the Department of Education’s College Scorecard.
In outcomes, at any given college, students from lowand high-income families have very similar earnings outcomes.
This story originally appeared in the Fall 2017 Lion.
