Comparisons of California Universities’ Mobility

We compare the UC campuses and Stanford and USC in their recruitment of lower income students, and the mobility of their graduates at age 34.  This is done using the application on Upshot of the NY Times, based on the data of the study of the Equality-of-Opportunity Organization.

My apologies to UC Santa Cruz.  I tried to add them also to the table, but there either was a limit, or it got hung up.

The first table is the percentage of students enrolled from the bottom 40% of family incomes.  Ignore the rankings, since only UCLA was included as an elite college.  The percentages range from 17% to 29% for UC campuses.  UC Santa Cruz should have been in the table at 17.9%.  Stanford at 9.6%, and USC at 11.6%, were at about half of the UC campuses.

In the second table the first column is the percentage of students whose parents have incomes from the lowest 40%.  It is a little under the same thing in the first table.  The second column is the Success Rate, or the percentage of students from the bottom 40% who made it to the top 40%.  All of the UC campuses in the table showed a similar success rate, from 66% to 72%.   UC Santa Cruz should have been in this table at 16.7%, 59.5%, and 10.0%.  Stanford was just slightly above this range with a Success Rate at 74%.  The third column is the Mobility, or the product of the first two columns, and thus the percent of the student body that went from the lower 40% to the upper 40% income rate.

For the elite colleges, even if they have a Success Rate that is almost 100%, if they have only 8% of low family income students, their Mobility will not exceed 8%.  The UC campuses ranged in Mobility from 10% to 21%.  The Mobility is a rate for contributing upward mobility to society.  Since the UC System has about 200,000 undergraduates, it contributes far more educated upward mobile graduates than the small and very hard to get into eight Eastern Elite universities.

 

 

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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