The data presented in these graphs were obtained from Equality of Opportunity College Level Characteristics. Graph 1 compares the location of the top 20 colleges and graph 2 compares the locations of all 190 colleges from the data. The top 20 colleges are highlighted in a separate graph for they had the highest mobility rates out of 190 colleges in the data. Looking at graph 1, 75% ofthe top 20 colleges are in the northeast, 15% are in the south and 10% are in the West. These top 20 ranking colleges in the data set provide the highest upward mobility of students enrolled. These colleges are less selective than Emory for instance but their mobility rate exceeds Emory along with other top ranking colleges like Harvard, Stanford, Duke, etc. Here, we’ll be taking a look to see if there is some correlation between location of these colleges, accesses, financial availability and fund provisions for these top 20 colleges. We’ll be considering these factors to find similarities or dissimilarities between the opportunities provided regionally and how that contributes to where the top mobility colleges are located where they are and why they are so successful.
May Wong wrote an article for Stanford News titled Stanford research analyzes colleges as engines of upward mobility. The article mentions that public colleges and universities “dominate… highest mobility rates, and all are located within California, New York and Texas”. Data collection for that research study, was gained from studying the “anonymized tax records” of 2187 American colleges from years 1999 – 2013. The data used to generate graph 1 was obtained from Equality of Opportunity Project. It’s not surprising to see the top states having the highest mobility (out of the top 20) being the exact same states mentioned in this article. The article then goes on to describe how these colleges admitted have large numbers of students who are low -income but they’ve yet to see how well and what is the correlation between mid tier public schools and high mobility rates. The article also mentioned a paper from Equality of Opportunity Project which talks about how kids from richest/top 1% class are close to 80% likely to attend Ivy League colleges compared to the nations bottom 5th percent.
But back to the topic of college location effect on mobility, this article does not articulate well that connection. It’s difficult to find the connection because a multitude of external factors are at play. The community, surroundings, funding, and public school education of states are not entirely equal so it’s difficult to control for that and pinpoint exactly why there could be an association or trend.
