Baruch College Ranks #1 for Social Mobility from CollegeNET
Fourth Consecutive Year Earning Top Spot on CollegeNET’s Social Mobility IndexOctober 24, 2018
Baruch College continues to earn national recognition as an engine of social mobility.
In CollegeNET’s 2018 Social Mobility Index (SMI), released on October 23, Baruch ranked #1 for the fourth consecutive year. The SMI analyzes 1,380 four-year colleges and universities nationwide according to “how effectively they enroll students from low-income backgrounds and graduate them into well-paying jobs.”
“I am pleased that CollegeNET continues to recognize Baruch College’s success in promoting student social mobility,” said Mitchel B. Wallerstein, PhD, president of Baruch College. “Our success in this area is the result of factors that benefit all of our students: strong academics, an engaged faculty, high affordability, and comprehensive support services that enable students to complete their studies expeditiously and to succeed in professional environments and graduate studies.”
He added, “Since the College’s founding 50 years ago, Baruch has strived to deliver these essentials to our hard-working and striving students, many of whom are—as they always have been—immigrants to the United States and frequently the first in their family ever to attend college.”
Supporting Students at Every Step
In its nationally distributed press release, CollegeNET said the goal of the SMI is to “recast the competition for ‘prestige’ among institutions so that it drives factors that improve access, affordability and graduation rate, and thereby advances higher education’s contribution to economic mobility.”
CollegeNET also recognized Baruch College as a “social mobility innovator” earlier this year, where they credited the institution’s “start-to-finish program that makes college affordable and that supports low-income students every step of the way — from matriculation to career placement.”
Social Mobility Leader
To illustrate Baruch’s success in advancing social mobility, CollegeNET’s “social mobility innovator” announcement featured interviews with four Baruch undergraduates and alumni who shared their personal stories of achieving academic and professional achievement because of Baruch’s encouraging environment, career services, and opportunities ranging from mentorships to networking.
In August, Baruch College ranked #1 for social mobility among four-year public institutions, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2018 Almanac. The Chronicle’s list was drawn from a widely reported study of colleges’ impact on social mobility by a team led by Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty (formerly of Stanford University). The team’s 2017 study, “Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility,” tracked students from nearly every U.S. college, including nongraduates, and measured their subsequent earnings against millions of anonymous tax filings and financial aid records.
Baruch was also prominently highlighted in bestselling author Steven Brill’s book Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It. Brill points to Baruch as an example of a higher education institution that is “laying the foundation for real, lasting change.” In the section about the College, “A Non-Elite Mobility Engine,” Brill writes that Baruch “has developed a menu of programs that leaves little to chance and that offers a road map for how more higher education institutions can create new kind of meritocracy that is not nearly as generationally entrenched.”
See below for coverage of Baruch College additional recognitions during 2018:
- Forbes America’s Top Colleges 2018
- Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Best College Values of 2018
- Money Magazine Best Colleges 2018
- The Princeton Review’s The Best 384 Colleges – 2019 edition
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