Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility
United States Department of the Treasury · National Bureau of Economic Research · +3 more institutions
Abstract
We characterize intergenerational income mobility at each college in the United States using data for over 30 million college students from 1999-2013. We document four results. First, access to colleges varies greatly by parent income. For example, children whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile. Second, children from low-and high-income families have similar earnings outcomes conditional on the college they attend, indicating that low-income students are not mismatched at selective colleges. Third, rates of upward mobilitythe fraction of students who come from families in the…
Citation impact
- FWCI
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- Percentile
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- References
- 37
Authors
5- RCRaj ChettyCorresponding
United States Department of the Treasury, National Bureau of Economic Research, Brown University, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University
- JNJohn N. Friedman
United States Department of the Treasury, National Bureau of Economic Research, Brown University, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University
- ESEmmanuel Saez
United States Department of the Treasury, National Bureau of Economic Research, Brown University, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University
- NTNicholas Turner
United States Department of the Treasury, National Bureau of Economic Research, Brown University, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University
- DYDanny Yagan
United States Department of the Treasury, National Bureau of Economic Research, Brown University, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University
Topics & keywords
- Earnings
- Social mobility
- Demographic economics
- Elite
- Descriptive statistics
- League table
- Demography
- Political science
- No poverty