• Home
  • Contact Us!
  • Privacy Policy

Radio Metta

  • Home
  • Business
  • Education
  • Health
  • Home Deco
  • News
  • Real Estate
  • Technology
  • Contact Us!
  • Privacy Policy
Home» Education»Higher Education’s Questionable Equality-of-Opportunity Promise

Higher Education’s Questionable Equality-of-Opportunity Promise

Saheli 25 Jan 2017 Education Comments Off on Higher Education’s Questionable Equality-of-Opportunity Promise 321 Views

Are colleges engines of upward mobility? The preeminent expert on upward mobility, economist Raj Chetty of Stanford University, has a new paper out that seeks to answer that question. Along with coauthors John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, Chetty created a one-of-a-kind dataset to track college attendees’ fortunes after they leave school—and compare those outcomes to the students’ economic backgrounds before entering college.

Encouragingly, the authors find that after attending the same college, students from poor and rich backgrounds see their adulthood incomes nearly equalized: the dream scenario for equality-of-opportunity enthusiasts. However, this finding does not necessarily mean that simply sending everyone to college will generate a fully egalitarian society.

Helpfully, the Chetty team has made its underlying data available to the public. The graph below shows how students from different economic backgrounds fare in each “tier” of colleges. Flatter lines mean that students who attend the same type of college can expect similar incomes in adulthood regardless of their background as a child; steeper lines mean that a parent’s income has influence over his child’s fortunes in adulthood even though the child has received a college education.

Source: Author’s calculations based on Equality of Opportunity Project data.

Source: Author’s calculations based on Equality of Opportunity Project data.

For the most part, the lines are relatively flat. A child born into the bottom income quintile who attends an Ivy League or similarly elite college can expect to be in, on average, the seventy-second income percentile as an adult. In other words, a child whose parents were poorer than four-fifths of their fellow Americans can expect to be richer than nearly three-quarters of the population in adulthood—quite the turnaround. What’s even more striking is that a child born into the top quintile who attends the same college only fares slightly better than his low-income peer.

At these very elite colleges, students who were affluent as children will be only six percentiles higher in the income distribution than students who were poor. Similarly small earnings gaps exist for rich and poor students who attend colleges within less elite “tiers.” But among the American population as a whole, the relative earnings gap is over four times larger. Therefore, conditional on attending a certain type of college, most of the “opportunity gap” between rich and poor children disappears.

This works both ways—while poor students who attend Ivy League colleges do almost as well as their rich peers, students from wealthy backgrounds who attend nonselective colleges fare only a little better than their poor classmates. A top-quintile student who attends a nonselective college has downward mobility: on average, he will end up in the middle quintile as an adult.

The reason America still has such a large “opportunity gap” is because students from different economic backgrounds attend different colleges. True, poor students who go to Ivy League schools fare extremely well—but they make up a very small fraction of the student body there. As Chetty and his coauthors note, children with parents in the top 1% attend Ivy League colleges at 77 times the rate of children with parents in the bottom quintile.

[Source:-Forbes]

Education's Equality-of-Opportunity higher promise Questionable 2017-01-25
Tags Education's Equality-of-Opportunity higher promise Questionable
Facebook Twitter Stumble linkedin Pinterest More

Authors

Posted by : Saheli
Previous Article :

Almost everyone in Trump’s cabinet has experience with public education—except the education secretary

Next Article :

Emma Stone’s Trainer Swears By These 3 Full-Body Exercises

Related Articles

Why a focus on foundational education must be at the heart of the response: Out of school but not out of reach

Why a focus on foundational education must be at the heart of the response: Out of school but not out of reach

admin 23 Aug 2025
EdTech Hub at CIES 2025

EdTech Hub at CIES 2025

admin 19 Mar 2025
The most recent artificial intelligence news we declared in January

The most recent artificial intelligence news we declared in January

admin 07 Feb 2025

Latest Post

How is PSA used to monitor prostate cancer?
Health

How is PSA used to monitor prostate cancer?

admin 01 Sep 2025
The Future of High Performance Networking: Ultra Ethernet Explained
Technology

The Future of High Performance Networking: Ultra Ethernet Explained

admin 28 Aug 2025
Why a focus on foundational education must be at the heart of the response: Out of school but not out of reach
Education

Why a focus on foundational education must be at the heart of the response: Out of school but not out of reach

admin 23 Aug 2025
HP Increases Innovation in Gaming
Technology

HP Increases Innovation in Gaming

admin 19 Aug 2025
Anatomy, Function, and Common Injuries of Hamstring Muscles
Health

Anatomy, Function, and Common Injuries of Hamstring Muscles

admin 12 Aug 2025
Gaming Your Way to Sharper AI Prompts
Technology

Gaming Your Way to Sharper AI Prompts

admin 07 Aug 2025
15 Elegant Living Room Hanging Lights
Home Deco

15 Elegant Living Room Hanging Lights

admin 04 Aug 2025
September 2025
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930  
« Aug    
  • Home
  • Contact Us!
  • Privacy Policy
Copyright 2016, All Rights Reserved
Magazine Blog News WordPress Theme