부산대학교 도서관

The "Moving on Up? What Groundbreaking Study Tells Us About Access, Success, and Mobility in Higher Ed" report by Stephen Burd seeks to raise awareness of the data published in a paper, "Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility." This paper was released at the same time that Donald Trump began his presidency, therefore, it may not have received as much attention as it could have, considering the findings. New America published a blog series highlighting the information from the Mobility Report Cards paper and versions of those posts have been reprinted in this report. The paper and this report gathered data from de-identified tax records from students, who attended college between the years 1999 and 2013, as well as from their parents. They also used the College Scorecard provided by the U.S. Department of Education, which supplied the information about the early adulthood earnings of the more than 30 million Americans for which data was gathered. The report begins by highlighting that the Mobility Report Card data demonstrates that college access is still a problem despite increases in the number of students receiving financial aid and the increasing number of low-income students pursuing degrees after high school. The report concludes that "access rates for low-income students have an inverse relationship with selectivity and prestige." This is applicable in both public and private institutions. Many low-income students are attending community colleges and for-profit institutions, which do not have as high mobility rates as the more selective and prestigious public and private institutions nor do they have the necessary resources to assist these students. Furthermore, a significant discovery that arose from this data is that low-income students are nearly as successful as their wealthier counterparts that graduate from the same institution. Therefore, this finding contradicts the popular assumption that low-income students should settle for colleges that are less selective and that they should be going to the best college they can.