The colleges that move kids up: the mobility leaders are regional publics, not famous names

The finding, in plain English

A college's mobility rate is simple math: access × success. Access is the share of a college's students who grew up in the bottom 20% of family income. Success is the share of those students who reach the top 20% of earners as adults. Multiply the two and you get the share of the whole student body that made the full bottom-to-top climb.

The leaders are regional publics. 9 of the top 12 four-year colleges by mobility rate are public, and 6 are CUNY campuses. At CUNY Bernard M Baruch College, 27.6% of students come from the bottom income quintile and 46.8% of them reach the top quintile — a mobility rate of 12.9%.

The famous names launch their low-income students very well — they just enroll very few of them. Across the twelve Ivy-Plus colleges, the median success rate is a remarkable 57.9%, but the median access figure is just 3.6% — so the median Ivy-Plus mobility rate works out to 2.0%. Baruch's rate is about 6.5 times that.

The contrast: high success, small doors

The most selective colleges are genuinely good at launching the low-income students they enroll — their success rates are among the highest anywhere. What holds their mobility rates down is the other factor: only a few students per hundred come from the bottom quintile at all.

Four takeaways for families

1. Mobility takes both doors and ladders. A college only moves students up if it admits them in real numbers and launches them once they're there. That's why the leaderboard is dominated by campuses that do both at once — not by the colleges with the single best outcomes or the single widest doors.
2. The mobility engines are close to home. 6 CUNY campuses, Cal State Los Angeles, and Texas border publics fill the top of the list. These are commuter-friendly, moderately priced regional publics — the schools working families can actually reach, doing the heavy lifting of the American income ladder.
3. An elite admit is still a strong mobility outcome — the odds are the constraint. For a low-income student who gets in, the Ivy-Plus colleges deliver: a median 57.9% of their bottom-quintile students reach the top quintile. The catch is that so few students get that chance — median access of 3.6%. Apply if the profile supports it; just don't build the whole plan on it.
4. Look up any college's numbers before you decide. Our sortable table covers 2,199 colleges — access, success, and mobility rate for each — and most college names on this page link to a full profile with costs, outcomes, and scholarships alongside.

Method & sources: Opportunity Insights, "Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility" (Chetty, Friedman, Saez, Turner & Yagan) — de-identified tax records linking parents' household income at enrollment to the student's own earnings in their early-to-mid-30s. Income quintiles are national. Access = share of students with parents in the bottom quintile; success = share of those students reaching the top quintile; mobility rate = the product of the two. Figures reflect the cohorts in the published Opportunity Insights data (students enrolled in the 2000s), the most recent college-level release. Our copy of the data covers 2,199 colleges; the leaderboard is restricted to the 1,363 four-year colleges with a computable mobility rate. Percentages are rounded to one decimal. See the full methodology.