Baruch Ranks #1 Among Four-Year Public Colleges Nationwide as Engine of Economic Mobility
#2 among all four-year public and private colleges, according to Brookings Institution ReportJune 18, 2020
Baruch College is one of the nation’s top four-year higher education institutions that successfully promotes upward economic and social mobility among its lower-income students, according to recent findings from the Brookings Institution.
Baruch College is one of the nation’s top four-year higher education institutions that successfully promotes upward economic and social mobility among its lower-income students, according to recent findings from the Brookings Institution.
In its “Opportunity Engines: Middle-Class Mobility in Higher Education” report, the Brookings Institution ranks Baruch College as:
- #1 among all four-year public colleges across the nation
- #2 among private and public colleges in the U.S.
Brookings Institution’s “Bottom-to-Top Mobility” measure depends on both how many bottom-quintile students a college enrolls (bottom-quintile “access”), and what proportion of those enrolled bottom-quintile students reach the top earnings quintile in adulthood (“success”).
In addition to Baruch, four other City University of New York (CUNY) senior colleges ranked within the top 10.
“CUNY has throughout its history been a beacon of access, opportunity and economic mobility for all New Yorkers, and we are proud that in recent years we have been especially focused on helping students from the lowest income levels join the middle class,” said Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez. “Social mobility is increasingly the gold-standard measure of colleges’ value and the Brookings report is further affirmation of CUNY’s record of success.”
Baruch College: A Leading College for Social Mobility and Academic Excellence
This latest recognition adds to Baruch’s growing list of acknowledgment for successfully moving students up the income ladder, from the lowest economic rung to the middle class and beyond.
Baruch has been ranked #1 on CollegeNET’s 2019 Social Mobility Index for five straight years, placing ahead of 1,458 four-year colleges and universities analyzed in its nationwide survey for successfully enrolling low-income students and graduating them into well-paying jobs.
Within the last year, Baruch College earned numerous top rankings for both social mobility and academic excellence, including:
- #1: Forbes’ “America’s Best Value Colleges 2019,” among public institutions in the Northeast
- #2: U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Regional Universities-North”
- #2: Money’s “Best Colleges in America”
Methodology
The Brookings “Middle Class Mobility” report used the same data and similar methodology as a pioneering and widely cited 2017 study 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, measured their subsequent earnings against millions of anonymous tax filings and financial aid records. The study assessed data for more than 1,600 colleges and ranked the schools according to the percentage of their graduates who came from families in the bottom 20 percent of income level and eventually reached the top 20 percent for individual earnings.
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