The 2026 NCAA women’s tournament, combining a mix of expected winners and up-and-coming programs, has provided an exciting month of basketball for millions of fans across the nation. In the last few years, thanks to the athleticism and on and off the court charisma of powerhouse stars in both pro and college teams, women’s basketball is now front and center and more thrilling than ever. 

Witness, for instance, the Vanderbilt Commodores’ Mikayla Blakes, the nation’s leading scorer, perform a near triple-double with 25 points against Illinois. Or the outstanding performance of UCLA’s Lauren Betts and Gabriela Jaquez as the Bruins stomped the Gamecocks of South Carolina to win the school’s first NCAA national title. The list that highlighted the Madness this March could go on, but the point is clear: Women’s basketball is a treat to watch.

But how well do these competitive schools, whose ability on the court has been rewarded with bids to the Big Dance, do when it comes to helping their students reach financial security? 

To find out, I have applied a methodology detailed in my recent analysis of the men’s tournament. 

The formula used ranks each college on an Economic Mobility Index (EMI), based on how many years graduates need to pay down the total net cost of their degree; how much more than a high school graduate the college’s bachelor’s degree recipients earn after 10 years; and how broadly the school’s effort applies to its low- and moderate-income students, using the percentage of students eligible for Pell grants as a proxy for low family income. 

Consequently, the EMI ranks 1,320 bachelor’s degree-granting institutions by how well each provides economic mobility for its most disadvantaged students. 

One way to grasp the value of the EMI is by comparing the two colleges that made it to the NCAA Tournament’s championship game. Although both schools are mighty on the court, there are wide differences in the statistics they provide for the tournament and for the index. To get to the championship game, the No. 1 seeded Bruins of University of California-Los Angeles had to overcome 23 turnovers and survive a late surge from the Texas Longhorns to manage a 51-44 win against the only team that beat them this season. Meanwhile, the South Carolina Gamecocks made it by breezing past the Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University. 

More significantly, in the Social Mobility Tournament, the University of South Carolina got only as far as the second round because the school’s total price tag is $43,300, but the earning premium for its graduates — compared with someone with only a high school diploma — averages just $28,600. Therefore, it takes 1.5 years on average to pay down the cost of its degrees. Compare this to UCLA, where a degree costs $34,500 and the earning premium is a whopping $45,000, making it possible to pay back the amount spent on a degree in less than one year. 

What’s more, South Carolina’s student body is made up of only 19.9% Pell-eligible students, compared with 31.9% for UCLA. The result: South Carolina ranks 501 in our index with a 17.6 EMI score, whereas UCLA, which went on to play in the championship game in both our bracket and the NCAA tournament, is ranked 115 with an EMI score of 30.4. 

Given the challenges colleges face today, as more and more people question whether they are worth the cost, the EMI calculations provide an important service. Not only do they help to identify which colleges are associated with the highest return on the educational investment made, but also which ones are doing so for the greatest numbers of underresourced students.

From a wider perspective, the 2026 NCAA teams in the Sweet Sixteen were a formidable lot. The No. 1 seeded University of Connecticut Huskies crushed the Syracuse Orange. The No. 1 seeded Gamecocks of South Carolina did the same to the embattled Trojans of USC. Meanwhile, the Louisiana State University Tigers, on their way to a fourth consecutive Sweet Sixteen appearance, battered the unfortunate Lady Raiders of Texas Tech by a punishing 101-47 score. 

Still, not every game leading to the Sweet Sixteen was lopsided. In one of the most thrilling games of the tournament, the Gophers of Minnesota sneaked by the Ole Miss Rebels by a mere 2 points, and it took two overtime periods for the University of Virginia Cavaliers to best the Hawkeyes of Iowa. 

But no matter which team you rooted for, this is exhilarating basketball right through to the Final Four matches between four No. 1 seeds. Still, as I have noted in the past, what should be no less thrilling is observing how well some of the tournament’s schools succeed in putting their students on the path to economic security.

After all, with college costs a major concern for most parents and students, an examination of the total net price to earn a degree at the participating schools is worth undertaking. For example, on average, an undergraduate degree at the Sweet Sixteen colleges in our Social Mobility Tournament costs approximately $40,900 but provides an earning premium beyond a high school graduate of about $32,200. It is data like these that make possible an earning premium that permits a graduate to pay down the cost of their degree in less than two years. This type of information is important for anyone considering a college education.

Also important is knowing how wide the door is open at any institution. For instance, when it comes to access, the colleges in our Sweet Sixteen differ greatly from their counterparts in the NCAA tournament. The Social Mobility Sweet Sixteen enroll nearly twice as many Pell-eligible students — 138,000 out of 461,600 — than those in the NCAA Sweet Sixteen, where only 74,200 out of 342,000 students qualify for Pell grants. 

While the winners in the NCAA tournament receive much praise, and their schools enjoy both bragging rights and potential increases in applications and donations, there is much reason to also celebrate this year’s Social Mobility Tournament champion, the University of California at San Diego. 

Not only did the Tritons win the Big West Tournament, but they also enjoy a 34.8 EMI score, putting them in 68th place out of 1,320 schools in the index. This means their approximately 11,100 lower-income graduates can pay back the cost of their education in less than one year and go on to earn on average more than $43,600 than a high school graduate in California.

I look forward to seeing powerhouse teams like the NCAA’s Final Four win games, but more than that, I am pleased that policymakers on both sides of the aisle in Congress and in state legislatures are now paying close attention to which schools are putting their students on the road to financial well-being. These are the schools most worthy of our praise and most deserving of the admiration that comes with success, whatever their fate on the court.

March Madness, that anxious, exciting and promising time for players and fans alike, is upon us. Like millions of others, I have been really enjoying these three weeks of competitive games full of surprises and awesome athletic feats. However, beyond the thrills, this moment highlights the stakes not just for the players, but also for colleges and their broader missions. While loyal students and alumni have experienced moments of joy and grief as they followed their schools’ progress, and administrators hoped for wins that will increase applications and donations, even more important for the nation is how these colleges enable upward economic mobility for their graduates. 

American higher education is experiencing one of the most challenging times in its history. Since 2017, when �鶹��Ʒ began publishing a Social Mobility Tournament bracket composed of colleges participating in the Big Dance, the percentage of surveyed adults who believe a four-year degree is not worth the cost has risen from 40% to 63%. 

This loss in public support that colleges previously took for granted has made them targets of both left- and right-leaning critics and policymakers. They are demanding that schools take greater responsibility not only for educating students, but for ensuring that the education they receive leads to employment with meaningful earnings.

With this in mind, our bracket aims to shift the focus to the broader mission of higher education: advancing economic mobility. Beginning in 2017, each year we have taken the schools competing in the NCAA Division 1 basketball tournament and plotted them in a parallel bracket, where winners and losers are determined not by their prowess on the court, but by how well the colleges put students on the road to financial security.

To do this, we employ Third Way’s Economic Mobility Index (EMI), created by the former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard, Michael Itzkowitz. This index uses information from the department and the Census Bureau to rank 1,320 bachelor’s degree-granting institutions by how well each provides economic mobility for its students. Taking into account the key concerns of students, parents and policymakers, the EMI first assesses the return on investment for lower- and moderate-income students at each college by calculating the out-of-pocket costs required to earn a four-year degree. 

The index then considers the added financial benefits students gain from attending one of these schools. This earnings premium is the additional income graduates accrue compared to someone with only a high school diploma. In effect, the lower the out-of-pocket costs and the higher the earnings premium, the quicker a student will receive a return on the investment needed to obtain the degree. Lastly, the index rewards schools for the proportion of financially challenged students they enroll and for the return on investment they deliver. (Click on each school in the bracket to see its Social Mobility score, total net price, earning premium and how long it takes graduates to pay off the cost of their education.)

To make this clearer, consider the following: While the Wolverines of the and the Wildcats of the faced each other in this year’s NCAA Final Four, neither school went further than the second round in our Social Mobility Tournament bracket. After all, Michigan had a lowly score of 16.9 in the EMI and Arizona only a slightly higher ranking at 25.1. Digging into the data, this disparity shows the importance of each data point that composes the index’s score.

As a EMI breakdown shows, the University of Arizona, a public institution, has a total price of $41,000 but an earning premium of a mere $23,700 for graduates when compared with someone holding only a high school diploma. This translates into a price-to-earnings premium that allows Wildcat graduates to pay off the cost of their education in 1.7 years. But the University of Michigan enjoys a net price of just $15,850 and a handsome earning premium of $48,800, making it possible for grads to pay down the total cost of their degree in only 0.3 years.

While winning games in a tournament made up of proven champions is a difficult achievement for any college, helping students move up the economic ladder is no less a challenge, especially for schools serving a high percentage of low- and moderate-income undergraduates. That’s why we believe colleges should be honored not only for victories on the court, but also for earning a high ranking in the Economic Mobility Index.

So, which teams deserve the highest praise this year? Of the 68 teams in the Social Mobility Tournament bracket, only 16 are private universities, and just six of them advanced past the first round. Moreover, by the end of Round 2, just a single private school, , managed not only to reach our Sweet 16, but, as it did last year, to go on to win our Social Mobility Tournament.

The main surprise here is that any private school could go that far, considering that the EMI is based primarily on affordability — how quickly the cost of a degree can be repaid — and the percentage of students enrolled who require financial aid. Therefore, beyond producing winning teams that can be invited to the NCAA tournament, private colleges must be inexpensive and serve a wide range of students to move up the Social Mobility Bracket. 

Given these requirements, how did BYU win it all? Though the Cougars were beaten by the in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, they earned their 33rd straight bid by having a 23-12 season in which they defeated eight teams ranked among the Associated Press’ Top 25. In addition, have a price-to-earnings premium that permits them to pay down the cost of their degree in less than a year, a feat made possible through low tuition and generous financial aid. Meanwhile, the school serves a student body in which nearly 37% of students receive Pell Grants.

How about the other three teams that make up our Final Four? How did they get there? The , and all have high EMI scores of at least 35%, giving them rankings that place them in the top 104 out of 1,320 colleges in the index. This translates into graduates who on average can pay down the cost of their degrees in fewer than four years, and all while having student bodies made up of at least 36% Pell Grant recipients. These, then, are excellent examples of schools working to increase the social mobility of their students.

In this highly polarized time, it is good to know that a bipartisan consensus exists around policies that require colleges to do more to help students gain employment with reasonable earnings. This state of affairs supports our nearly decade-long call to praise colleges like those in our Final Four. After all, few athletes will ever make the pros, but all students need to make a decent, family-sustaining living.

Clarification: The Economic Mobility Index is the property of Third Way.

But the NCAA tournament is not just fun and games for the schools involved; the stakes can be high. Beyond earning bragging rights, schools with triumphant teams can expect increases in both applications and donations. And a small number of players, having demonstrated amazing feats of agility, coordination and speed, can make it to the NBA draft.

Still, for the rest, basketball is only a sideshow to the serious business of higher education. College is about many things (yes, including sports), but one of the most important contributions America’s universities make to society is helping students move up the ladder of economic success.

Central to the American Dream is the belief every generation should do better financially than the previous one and that even low-income students should have a shot at moving up in the world. Despite everything that’s happening, most Americans expect colleges to serve as engines of economic growth and personal improvement.

So how well do the universities whose names are emblazoned on the players’ jerseys excel at helping their students move up the income ladder?

For the last eight years, we have taken the opportunity, while Americans are debating which are the best teams on the court, to examine which of the participating colleges are best at assisting their students in doing well economically after they graduate. 

Each year, we have constructed a parallel Social Mobility Tournament Bracket, plotting how well or how poorly the colleges participating in the national tournament do in helping to place students on a path leading to the American Dream of upward mobility.

From 2017 to 2022, we constructed our bracket by comparing the tournament’s colleges according to how many of their low-income students were earning family-sustaining earnings by their early 30s. In 2023, we shifted to comparisons that take into consideration college access, affordability and post-graduation earnings — that is, the issues that are top of mind for today’s students, parents and policymakers. 

As we noted last year, present-day families and legislators want to know which colleges are worth their tuition cost in time and money; how long a student will have to work to pay off that cost; and what proportion of each college’s under-resourced students is being placed on the path to financial security.

To account for these concerns, we have turned to the (EMI), created by the former director of the , Michael Itzkowitz, as source material for our bracket. 

Using publicly available information from the department and the Census Bureau, this index ranks 1,320 bachelor’s degree-granting institutions by how well each provides economic mobility for its students. To do so, it first considers the return on investment that lower-income students obtain at each college by calculating the out-of-pocket costs required to obtain a four-year degree. 

The index then considers the additional financial benefits students obtain by attending one of these schools. This earnings premium is the additional income graduates make in comparison to someone with only a high school diploma. In short, the lower the out-of-pocket costs and the higher the earnings premium, the quicker a student will receive a return on the investment needed to obtain the degree. Lastly, the index rewards schools for the proportion of lower- and moderate-income students it enrolls in addition to the return on investment it provides.

By considering not only the percentage of students who move up the economic ladder, but also the number of graduates qualified for federal Pell Grants, we can also assess the role each college plays in helping the nation as a whole improve social mobility for its less advantaged students.

Given that rankings on the EMI rely heavily on affordability and the percentage of underresourced students, it is no surprise that only six private colleges made it to Round 2 in our parallel bracket. 

To understand why only two of them made it to the Sweet Sixteen in our Social Mobility Tournament Bracket, consider that the average net price for a degree at these six schools is $68,500. On the other hand, a degree at the 26 public colleges that also made it to Round 2 costs only $39,000, a nearly 44% discount.  

That said, the real surprise in our bracket this year is that a private university, , won the championship. The BYU Cougars, a 21 seed in the NCAA tournament, ranked 66 out of the 1,320 colleges in the EMI. Their graduates enjoy a price-to-earnings premium that allows them to pay down the total net cost of their degree in less than a year. 

Our Social Mobility Tournament runner-up, , is not far behind. The Tritons, the 47th seed in the NCAA tournament, rank 68 in the index and also manage to pay back the cost of their degree in less than a year. 

Indeed, the other two schools making up our Final Four, the universities of and , are also worthy of great praise. The former ranks 67 in the index, with its Cougars able to pay back their education in less than two years. Meanwhile, Memphis ranks a very respectable 130^th  in the index, with its Tigers taking only three years to pay back the cost of their degree.

Whichever school takes home the NCAA tournament trophy will rightly celebrate its prowess on the court and will likely reap the benefit of increased applications. In contrast, little to no acclaim will accrue to schools whose primary merit is their ability to help students reach family-sustaining wages when coming out of low-income households.

Nearly 4,500 basketball players make up the pool of tournament dreamers. These athletes are drawn from among the approximately 7.5 million young men who made up the nation’s high school graduating classes during four years. This means a male high school graduate has an extremely small chance of playing on a Division I basketball team, and of these, fewer than 1 in 75 senior players will ever be drafted by an NBA team. No doubt, much is at stake for players and schools as they battle their way to the Final Four.

But much is likewise at stake for the more than 16 million students who enroll in American two- or four-year colleges. Like the Division I players, most of them are working hard to gain a solid spot in the U.S. economy. But with college graduation rates rarely surpassing 60%, the colleges and universities that manage to do well for large numbers of low-income students are far more deserving of recognition than even those schools committed to producing winning basketball teams.

In effect, the Economic Mobility Index scores matter, and schools that rank high on it should celebrate them as a source of pride. After all, as we have said over the last eight years, these are the sorts of results that should be boosting applications from the many young adults who want to enjoy not only the ephemeral pleasure of having a winning school team, but also the long-term benefits of upward mobility.

Those guesses are surely correct at least sometimes. But what if they were right more often? Could it help schools put more students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds on a path to economic security? 

To find potential answers to these questions, the Urban Institute, where I lead the Center on Education Data and Policy, recently launched the . This year, we will in innovative research and development through our first request for proposals. The goal is to help educators understand which skills in schools are most strongly associated with long-term success, through research linking students’ competencies to upward mobility and by building new, easily collectable measures. An example of this could be a metric for career preparedness encompassing job-preparation and technical abilities.

It is important to first define how we view “mobility” through the context of this work, as we are using a of the term developed by the Urban Institute:  

• “Economic success: When a person has adequate income and assets to support their and their family’s material well-being.
• Power and autonomy: When a person has the ability to have control over their life, to make choices and to influence larger policies and actions that affect their future.
• Dignity and belonging: When a person feels the respect, dignity and sense of belonging that comes from contributing to and being appreciated by people in their community.”

An example of the types of work that Urban institute seeks to fund is in the area of noncognitive factors such as teamwork, grit and communication, which have been identified as predictors of wages and other positive life outcomes. A potential project could link data on noncognitive factors in school-age students at many schools to adult economic outcomes and compare variations among schools against economic mobility. 

To take it a step further, research could seek to determine whether a student’s noncognitive factors are more predictive of mobility if they are measured by a teacher of the same race.

A second objective is to expand the universe of mobility measurements. For example, has demonstrated that a student’s percentage of friends with high socioeconomic status is a key correlate of upward mobility for people with lower socioeconomic status. A potential project under this RFP could develop a new measure of social capital that could be collected in PK-12 schools. A proposed study might consider how the measure works in rural versus urban areas, and how it should incorporate school and neighborhood segregation.

Identifying the pre-K-12 skills that matter most for lifetime success takes a long time, between developing new measures, collecting data on them in schools, waiting many years for students to reach adulthood and connecting all the needed information. But the advantages to having this evidence are too great to ignore, and the current landscape is too bleak: Students who grow up in the poorest 20% of families have a of remaining poor as adults.

This is not to say that those pre-K-12 skills are the sole causes of, or potential solutions to, . Students face barriers that affect their ability to learn, such as substandard and inadequate health care, and that diminish the fruits of their labors after they leave school, such as and . This is why we are pushing all our grantees to consider individual students’ circumstances both in and beyond school. 

Today, most schools largely rely on the same measures of student success they’ve used for decades, such as reading and math scores, attendance and graduation rates. If our initiative is successful, schools in 2034 will regularly measure a set of skills that drive economic mobility and consciously work to improve them. That could make a real difference helping all students thrive after graduation — and put more low-income students on a path to economic security.

For the second year in a row, we have taken colleges participating in the women’s tournament and plotted them on an alternative bracket based on how well, or how poorly, they help make the American Dream of upward mobility a reality for their students.

Our parallel bracket makes use of an Economic Mobility Index (EMI) created by Michael Itzkowitz, former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. This index uses information from the department and the Census Bureau to calculate the out-of-pocket costs required to obtain a four-year degree and the return on investment for lower-income students at each school. Then, an earnings premium is determined, representing the extra income these students make 10 years after graduation in comparison with someone with only a high school diploma. It follows that the lower the cost to obtain a degree and the higher the earnings premium, the less time a graduate will need to pay down the total net cost of a degree. 

Because access is a major concern for parents and students, the EMI also considers the proportion of low- to moderate-income students enrolled, in order to measure how great an impact each school is making on the future of underresourced students. To make this assessment, the percentage of Pell Grant recipients (a proxy for low family income) at each college is multiplied by its percentile rank on return on investment that each school offers its students versus other colleges. 

The result is the college’s placement within the EMI and, therefore, its location on our Social Mobility Tournament bracket. The EMI rewards schools for both their proportion of lower- and moderate-income students and the additional return on investment it provides them. 

This year’s Sweet Sixteen in our Social Mobility Tournament bracket are all public universities, which educate the majority of low- and middle-income students. With the exception of the Kansas State Wildcats and the Rebels of Ole Miss — both of which lost in the second round — the rest of our Sweet Sixteen never made it past the first round of the NCAA tournament. 

However, what they lacked on the court was more than made up by their strength as social mobility powerhouses. Together, the 16 colleges educate nearly 293,000 undergraduates, an average 35.6% of whom are Pell Grant recipients who manage to pay back the cost of their education in approximately 2.5 years. This is made possible by an earnings premium that averages some $19,400 over the income of those with only a high school diploma. 

These numbers make possible EMI rankings between 51 and 536 (out of 1,320) and percentages from 16.9% to 37.3% (on a range of 0 to 66.7%). In short, our Sweet Sixteen rank higher than almost 60% of all other colleges in the EMI dataset, hundreds of which — whether public or nonprofit private schools — require 10 or more years to pay down the cost of their degree. And many offer only a small earnings premium beyond that of a high school graduate.

The Elite Eight in our bracket represents a significantly higher level of accomplishment compared with those that lost in the round of 16. First, their EMI rankings are much higher (ranging between 51 and 216). These eight colleges serve nearly 141,400 students, nearly 36% of whom are Pell Grant-eligible. With an average earnings premium of $18,000, their graduates pay back the cost of their education in just over two years. 

Still, our Final Four are in a class of their own. won 15 straight games on their way to the Mountain West championships. Though they lost in Round One, they rank 108^th on the index, with an EMI of 31.1%. With over 37% receiving Pell Grants, UNLV students pay off their schooling in less than two years and enjoy an earnings premium of nearly $18,000. Meanwhile, the Eastern Washington Eagles, experiencing their best season ever, beat Northern Arizona to capture the Big Sky Conference championship. Unfortunately, they were no match for the Oregon Beavers in the first round of the NCAA tournament, but they rank 117^th in the EMI at 30.4%. 

In the meantime, women ended their basketball season 26-7 and captured the Sun Belt Women’s Basketball championship, earning their first bid to the NCAA tournament since 1997. Though they suffered a lopsided loss to the Virginia Tech Hokies in Round One, they have every reason to be proud of their school. Attending a school ranking 110^th in the index, with an EMI score of 30.8%, the Thundering Herd pay only $24,100 for their degree while experiencing on average an earnings premium of $10,125. This makes it possible to pay off their degree in only 2.4 years. All this with a student population that is nearly 40% lower-income. 

Which leads us to the 2024 Social Mobility Tournament bracket champion: the They earned a spot in the NCAA tournament by defeating UC-Davis in the Big West Conference tourney. But they earned our bracket’s championship because their school does something far better for its students. With an average degree cost of $36,700 and an earnings premium of over $36,900, Anteaters can pay down the total net cost of their degree in one year. This helps put Irvine’s nearly 12,000 Pell students higher up on the escalator leading to family-sustaining earnings. With these numbers, the university has earned an exemplary EMI ranking of 51 in the index and a 37.3% EMI.

We look forward to this year’s NCAA Elite Eight and Final Four games, but most of all, we look forward to seeing colleges receive the attention and support they merit when they do as well for their students as our Sweet Sixteen manage to do for theirs. 

Since 2017, we have taken this opportunity, when Americans are debating which are the best college teams on the court, to examine which are best at helping their students succeed after they leave school. 

Our Social Mobility Tournament Bracket plots the tournament’s colleges by how well — or how poorly — they put their students on a path leading to the American Dream of upward mobility. 

This may not matter to the lucky players talented enough to be drafted by the NBA (a mere one in 75 of those playing in the tournament). But their not-so-fortunate classmates will likely face an uncharted trajectory of adult responsibilities after graduation.

While all colleges are supposed to instill in their students the skills, habits and knowledge they will need to have rewarding careers, those serving large numbers of low- and moderate-income students have a special obligation to make sure they are doing the right thing. That’s why our parallel bracket of winners and losers celebrates success in fostering economic mobility for all rather than the athletic prowess of a few.

From 2017 to 2022, our Social Mobility Tournament Bracket used the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights dataset to spotlight the extent to which disadvantaged students enrolled in the tournament’s colleges managed to reach family-sustaining earnings by their early 30s. That dataset, based on the percentage of students born to parents in the bottom 40% of income distribution who reached earnings in the upper 40% of household income, is now too limited for our purpose. 

Growing concerns about college access, affordability and post-graduation earnings demand more comprehensive tools by which to understand the value of higher education. Consequently, beyond how effectively schools help make intergenerational advancement possible, it is important to know which colleges are worth the cost of tuition in time and money; how long a student will have to work to pay off that debt; and what proportion of each college’s underresourced students is being placed on the path to financial security.

With that in mind, since last year we have used a dataset developed and analyzed by Michael Itzkowitz, former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. His Economic Mobility Index (EMI) ranks 1,320 bachelor’s degree-granting institutions by how well each provides economic mobility for its students.

Using publicly available information from the U.S. Department of Education and the Census Bureau, he first determined the return on investment that lower-income students obtain at each school by calculating the out-of-pocket costs required to obtain a four-year degree. He then considered the additional financial benefits students obtain by attending one of these schools — an earnings premium representing the extra income these graduates make in comparison with someone with only a high school diploma. The lower the out-of-pocket costs and the higher the earnings premium, the faster a student will receive a return on the investment needed to obtain the degree.

The EMI also considers the proportion of lower- and moderate-income students enrolled. If a college provides a very strong return on investment to lower-income students but most come from upper-class backgrounds, it cannot be said to provide meaningful economic mobility. Therefore, the EMI rewards schools for the proportion of lower- and moderate-income students it enrolls in addition to the return on investment it provides.

Most colleges that help provide social mobility for significant numbers of low- and middle-income students tend to be public. So it’s no surprise that 23 of the 32 in the second round are public. Given their focus on access to a high percentage of Pell Grant-eligible students and their relatively low tuition, these schools make it possible for their graduates to pay down the total net cost of their education in less than two years, on average.

That said, this year’s Sweet Sixteen includes three private universities: , and . The Sweet Sixteen were all ranked on the EMI above 371 (out of 1,320) and enjoyed an EMI average of 28.6% (on a range of 0 to 66.7%). These are exceptional numbers when one considers that these colleges are educating nearly 454,000 undergraduates, over 34% of whom are in households with gross adjusted incomes rarely higher than 225% of their state’s poverty guideline.

But to reach the social mobility Elite Eight, a high order of accomplishments was required. With the exception of the Michigan State Spartans, whose school ranked 332^nd on the index, the rest of the pack came in above 165th in rank, all while serving an undergraduate population that on average is 40% eligible for Pell Grants.  Which brings us to the 2024 social mobility Final Four: the Owls of (last year’s winner), the Cougars of , the Beach of and this year’s Social Mobility Tournament Champion, the Peacocks of . All were ranked above 66^th in the index, had EMI scores above 48% and served student bodies with over 48% Pell recipients.

St. Peter’s is a winner on and off the court. Two years ago, the team defeated mighty Kentucky on its way to the NCAA tournament‘s Elite Eight. This year, the 15th-seeded Peacocks return to the Big Dance having won the MAAC Tournament. Meanwhile, all 2,640 undergraduates receive financial aid and over 62% have Pell Grants. That, coupled with low tuition ($36,900 per degree) and an earnings premium of nearly $16,000 beyond what a high school grad would earn, makes it possible for St. Peters students to pay down the cost of their degree in just 2.3 years.

At 17th in the index and with a 49% EMI rank, St. Peter’s is a most deserving champion of our 2024 Social Mobility Tournament.

On this episode Timothy Knowles, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, joins Diane and Michael to discuss how this historic foundation looks to drive the future of American education. On K–12, they discuss why Carnegie has partnered with the Educational Testing Service and why they are seeking to assess a broader array of skills — not just focus on the standards that are already assessed. They also dive into Carnegie’s push to undo the Carnegie Unit and move toward a competency-based system. Knowles also shares details on the Foundation’s efforts to prioritize social and economic mobility in higher education by changing how they classify colleges and universities.  

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey Diane.

Diane Tavenner: Well, we are fully in the holiday season at this point, and I’m super curious. A couple of clips away from the big part of COVID, are you noticing or experiencing anything different this year?

Michael Horn: Oh, yes, we are. We are hosting constantly, it seems. We have had one of my kids’ entire class and all their friends over. We’ve had parties galore, and it seems like it’s never going to stop. We’re going to do it apparently straight through New Year’s. So that feels like a big difference. As you know, we’ve been renovating our house. That’s basically done. COVID basically done. Knock on wood that there’s nothing else coming. And so there we are. And here we are in this, our fifth season, still working through some of the sticky issues in K-12  education, all the way into how it impacts higher education and lifelong learning, frankly, and trying to give people a different vantage point on how to think about these intractable — historically — issues. And I guess the last thing to say is, as listeners know, this year we’re doing a lot more guests, a little less of Diane, Michael, a little bit more of people out there doing some really interesting work. And today you have invited a guest, Diane, who is doing a lot of interesting work. 

Diane Tavenner: That could not be more true, Michael. It is my great pleasure to have invited Tim Knowles here today to be with us. He’s the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. And as you know, I am really privileged to sit on the board of that foundation. And so I have a really front row seat to the ambitious agenda that the foundation is undertaking. So much of what Tim and the team are seeking to tackle relates to the topics that you and I have been talking about on all of these seasons here, on Class Disrupted. And so I just thought it would be really fun to go back and dig into some of those, like, seat time, competency-based learning, assessment, accountability, but through the lens of a really historic foundation that has a really ambitious, modern agenda and has had really profound impacts on our schools that I don’t think most people realize or understand. And so I’m super excited for this conversation. Tim, welcome.

Timothy Knowles: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Michael Horn: Yeah, well, we’re incredibly excited. I was really thrilled when Diane told me she was going to extend the invite. And before we dive into the work that you’re doing now that Diane just alluded to, I know that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning has a long and pretty storied history. Can you tell us a little bit about the organization and why it has mattered to K-12 education in this country?

Timothy Knowles: Sure. So, Carnegie Foundation is 120 years old and it’s been instrumental to a wide range of educational things. The first thing it did, literally the first thing it did was create TIA, now TIA CREF, the largest retirement fund for teachers, professors, and people working across the social sector. It then created the pesky Carnegie Unit, or the Course Credit, the bedrock currency of our educational economy, which I expect we might get into a little bit further. And it’s done other important things through its history. It created Pell Grants, it created standards for engineering, law, medicine and schools of education. And more recently, it introduced improvement science, known colloquially as continuous improvement, to the education sector. But big picture, it’s an institution which has, or I like to think of it as an institution which has, looking around the corner in its DNA. It’s identifying levers to press, to improve both the quality of K-12 and the post-secondary sector, to incubate things, and to bring them to life at a scale that’s persuasive. And today our stake is firmly in the ground for first-generation underrepresented and low-income young people nationwide.

Diane Tavenner: Well, and that is one of the many reasons that I really appreciate being able to be on the board and be a small part of what Tim and the team are working on. The only thing that I would add is I was really surprised to learn when I joined the board that it’s the first nonprofit in America. It was enacted by Congress and became the first nonprofit in America. So, many of us who work in education, I think, take nonprofit entities and organizations for granted. And here’s the founding member of that team. So just a really fascinating, long, long history.

Timothy Knowles: I look really good for 120, don’t I?

Michael Horn: Better every day.

Diane Tavenner: Interestingly, for how old it is…Are you president number eleven?

Timothy Knowles: Ten. 

Diane Tavenner: I mean, not a lot of presidents.

Michael Horn: That’s impressive.

Diane Tavenner: Tim, you just alluded to it. For the last stretch of time under the previous president, because you’ve been here at the Foundation for a couple of years now, the Foundation was really focused on improvement science. And one of the interesting elements of this Foundation is that the current president really gets to define, has the full latitude to define the agenda. And so under Tony Bryk, that’s when I joined and when a whole vibrant improvement science community really formed. You’re continuing that. You believe deeply in improvement science and have a long history of it as a method for how we do our work, but then have layered this really ambitious agenda on top. I want to start with one of those meta outcomes. There’s a few of them that you’re driving to, and that is to accelerate social and economic mobility and achieve equity across the educational sector. And you just alluded to this. Earlier in this season, we had Todd Rose on the podcast and he shared a number of findings that suggest that a majority of Americans are really starting to question the ROI of four-year college and even our K-12 education system. And that they have this perception that education has become the end goal versus sort of a means to achieving a good life, economic security, freedom, however you want to say that. And this big outcome that you’re talking about seems to be in tune with the sentiments of the American public, if you will. So will you talk to us about why this big meta outcome is important to the foundation and honestly, what you think can be done about it?

Timothy Knowles: So I’m going to start with a sort of personal reflection about that. My first job as a teacher was teaching Southern African history in Botswana, and it was before apartheid fell. And so by day I taught a fundamentally emancipatory history curriculum, and by evening and by weekend, I was involved more directly in what was then known simply as the Struggle. I had the opportunity about 25 years later to visit South Africa, which I hadn’t traveled to, when it was free. And I met with artists and activists and clergy like Desmond Tutu involved on the ground in the Struggle. And to a person, literally to a person, they said it was teachers, students, and professors who broke the back of apartheid. From a personal perspective, if educators were responsible for that, our work here to accelerate economic and social mobility and achieve equity seems eminently doable. I guess I would also say personally that I want to live in a nation and I want young people to live in a nation. Whether you grew up on Navajo Nation or in rural Appalachia or in the South Side of Chicago, you have the opportunity, legitimate opportunity, to lead a healthy and dignified life. I’m much less interested in arguments about the particular kind of school you attend public, private, charter, home school, or the time it takes to finish high school or a postsecondary degree. I care much more about how to build systems that enable millions more young people to possess the knowledge and skills that they need to lead purposeful lives. I know for your listeners, there are some out there who are going to be persuaded more by data about why social and economic mobility matter. There was a study, just to cite one study, there was a study by the Federal Reserve in Boston and economists from Duke and the New School. It was called the color of money. And they looked at the net worth of families living across a range of American cities by race. And the average white family’s net worth was $247,000. The average Puerto Rican family’s net worth was $3,020. And the average non-immigrant black family’s net worth is $8. To be clear, I’m not suggesting education is not a powerful engine of economic mobility. We know it is. What I am suggesting, and where Carnegie is putting our stake, is that it could be a much, much more powerful one.

Michael Horn: Just, I mean your own personal story and how you come to this is inspiring. Tim, the few times we’ve gotten to connect at different conferences and so forth, hearing you speak about it always touches a chord, I think, for those listening. And obviously you just alluded to how you all now want to make sure that the system evolves and really creates a lot more opportunity for a lot of individuals. And I think that relates to a big partnership that has been in the news quite a bit lately, which is this partnership with ETS, the Educational Testing Service. Can you tell us about what you’re trying to do and why?

Timothy Knowles: First of all, I don’t think assessment is a singular answer to serving young people better. Young people need to love school. They need to be engaged. They need to feel challenged and pressed. They need to learn hard things and relevant things. They need to experience learning, not just enact learning. So I don’t think we’re going to assess our way to a better place. However, there are a set of skills that we know matter, that we know predict success in life, in the workplace and in the schoolhouse, and yet we haven’t paid them as much attention as we might. And their skills affective behavioral, cognitive skills like persistence, communication, critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration. We think they deserve more attention, not at the expense of reading or algebra or history. Disciplinary knowledge really matters, and you can’t think critically without something to think about. But we think these skills in particular need to be elevated. We also know that these skills are developed in all kinds of contexts, both in the schoolhouse and outside, that many young people who demonstrate them, they’re too often invisible or illegible to postsecondary institutions, and to employers, and even to students and parents themselves. So just by way of an example of what I’m talking about, if I’m growing up in rural Indiana and I work for 2 hours every morning on my family farm, and then I get to high school at 7:30, every day on time. I have a 98% attendance rate. I do my homework on time, I get B’s or better, and then I have a job after school or on the weekends. Taken together, those skills, in my view, would represent persistence and they should be made visible to students themselves, certainly to educators and to postsecondary education institutions and employers. So if I was to state Michael, really simply, what we’re trying to do with ETS, we’re trying to build a set of tools that will provide insight into key predictive skills that the education sector has neglected. I don’t think teachers have neglected these skills, and I could say more about that. I think they know that these skills matter. But we want to build tools that will capture evidence of learning also wherever it takes place. And to make those insights visible and legible to students and parents, actionable for teachers, and useful for postsecondary institutions and employers. That’s at the heart of this.

Michael Horn: That’s super helpful. Diane may jump in as well because she’s been working in these domains for a long time. FoR1, I guess I’m curious when I hear you say that, from my perspective, critical thinking, creativity, things like that, there are a set of skills that can be applied in different domains, but being a good critical thinker is in a domain, right? It doesn’t necessarily cross unless you have domain knowledge. So I’m sort of curious how you square that circle with something like the example you used, perseverance, which I would put, in Diane’s language, the habits of success, different from skills, which might be a set of artifacts across lots of different domains to show those habits. And so I’m sort of curious, are you thinking of them all as the same set of assessments that will capture these? Or how do you distinguish some skills that sit within academic standards perhaps, or academic domains, let me say, versus those that maybe are a collective evidence across lots of bodies of work?

Timothy Knowles: That’s a great question. And frankly, is the work that we are doing right now is to figure this out in terms of which skills are we really going to draw on disciplinary knowledge? Which skills are we going to draw on extant data that may exist like the kid in Indiana I just described? And which skills actually do we need to build tools for from the ground up that we may not have a nuanced enough set of tools to measure, for example, collaboration or working with others? So do you need to build game-based or scenario-based tools that would help you, give you visibility in terms of how someone is developing on that arc? But it’s a very good question and clearly, whether it’s critical thinking or even persistence, you don’t want to divorce that from content and from subject matter. You learn a great deal about young people in terms of their persistence based on their approach to complicated problems and hard problems and how they go about solving them. So this isn’t divorced from disciplinary knowledge in that sense by any means. I think in terms of assessments, first of all, I should say the aim was not to take on the American assessment industry and all the politics that go with it and try to introduce an incrementally better set of disciplinary assessments that feels like that would be sort of a Common Core redux. And I think we saw that play out pretty clearly and we saw where dividends were paid and where they weren’t. So, I think really the intention here is to identify competencies that we know matter that predict success that are developed in all kinds of contexts and create a set of tools that won’t look or feel like traditional assessments and push the educational sector to attend to a richer array of outcomes. Another important thing that I think is worth pointing out, which actually makes me optimistic about this, perhaps more optimistic than I should be. There’s something, as you both know, but maybe not all your listeners know, that is sweeping the nation in the form of these things called portraits of a graduate, or portraits of learner. States and school systems and schools have been developing them, engaging lots of stakeholders, basically asking, who do we want our young people to be? What do we want them to be able to do? So colleagues from ETS analyzed as many as they could find. This is one of the wonderful things about being partnered with ETS. I feel like I have 3000 new employees I can ask to do things. But they analyzed all of these portraits, and there were about eight to ten core skills that Americans say they want young people to possess upon completion of K-12. It’s almost as though – and this resonates, Diane, with some of your work – but it’s almost as though there’s an invisible consensus about the core purpose of schooling. Kind of a river running through our nation, whether in red places or blue places, in cities, in rural areas, about what we want our young people, who we want our young people to be. That’s hopeful to me. So if we can help the other thing that people say about the portraits, if you speak to them candidly, is A) They haven’t changed anything, like we haven’t actually changed what’s going on on the ground, even though we put a lot of energy into it, and B) We have no way of measuring these things. That, to me, represents an opportunity in the US, right now, that I think is worth plumbing.

Michael Horn: I’ve just learned a tremendous amount from you, and I had a takeaway that I think I haven’t had from the press stories on this, which is, in essence, you’re not trying to do what we recommend you never do in disruptive innovation, which is to try to leapfrog the incumbents with a better assessment or a better this widget whatever, but instead go to the areas of non-consumption where the alternative is nothing. And you’re right. I see the same thing in the portraits of graduate, which is there’s no teeth. There’s no way to measure or represent or have an asset based framing around these things because there’s nothing to measure them. So you’re going there. I think maybe the second question is less mine and more what I think a lot of people are wondering, which is why partner with ETS on this? Because they have a reputation in different quarters and different ways, as you know. 

Timothy Knowles: That is a completely fair question, Michael. And I know you both know as well as I do that most assessment companies across the world are grappling with what their future will look like and are seeing, quote, market share evaporate really quickly. Standalone assessments that bring schools to a screeching halt for two weeks in May and are not predictive of very much, I hope are not going to be part of the equation for the long term. And yet those very assessment companies, including ETS, have made an incredible business based on that design. ETS is clear-eyed about that, in my view. They hired a new CEO, Amit Sivak, who is exceptionally clear-eyed about. And one of the magnetic forces, from my perspective, was they have the capacity to build for scale. I don’t, Carnegie doesn’t. We’re a small organization. When I introduced to the board the idea of focusing on the future of learning, which is really the aim here, is to get at learning. One of our board members, who is a very well regarded scholar of assessment, said, well, what about the future of assessment? And at the time I thought, we really don’t have the capacity to build credible, reliable, valid tools to do some of this work. Then, Amit, who I’d known prior to ETS, joined ETS, and I thought there was an opportunity that led to a year’s worth of conversations about whether they are willing to really try to innovate and in essence create a separate entity within ETS, but with its own walls and autonomy to build a new set of tools that would attend to these skills, that would think about assessment in very different ways and that would be focused on the insights that were generated, not focused on the test as it were. So that’s why ETS. Now, to be fair, again, I think the test for us is can we build something different? Is it going to be useful to young people? Is it going to be useful to parents, to teachers? I think we can, but I know we won’t know unless we try. That sounds slightly glib, but I think it’s true. Like we have to take a shot at broadening the picture of what we say is important for young people. It bears probably saying that we met recently as part of this work with the 50 teachers of the year from across the country, from each state, and introduced the work to them. And literally there were some teachers in the room in tears and I was like, “Why?” But they were saying, bring it. This is the work we want to do. This is in essence the work that parents know we should do. And this is why we started to teach in the first place. That’s my short answer to “Why ETS?” We have enough elegant examples that live around the edges of our profession. Everybody in this sector can point to elegant examples of competency-based learning that haven’t scaled. So we need to think about – if we’re serious about tipping or using this tipping moment – we have to figure out how to enact at a broader scale than we have tried to historically. 

Diane Tavenner: I will just add here because I hear the critiques, just like you, and the questions. And I will just add from a personal experience, I think you might know this, Michael, and Tim, you certainly do, that several years ago, Summit actually partnered with a startup assessment company that was doing these exact types of assessments. So I know they’re possible, I know that they can be done. And then, of course, as a startup company, they got acquired and employers valued and wanted these types of assessments and they couldn’t stay in K-12 where the market was so competitive and unreliable, etc. And that was such a disappointment to me because I saw such the possibility of those types of assessments and how they could be used and that they really were possible. And so it feels like this is where the sort of solidness and the expansiveness of ETS, perhaps, enables us to move forward. And I would just add a fun fact, which is I don’t think relevant, but ETS is yet another entity that the Carnegie Foundation created and then spun out.

Timothy Knowles: We did — 75 years ago 

Diane Tavenner: Tim, you have started alluding to this already because these things are all connected and linked, but you said assessment is just a small part of it. And when you first started, it wasn’t even a thing that you were thinking that we needed to do, because what you’re really setting out to do is sort of build this architecture that produces what you call reliably engaging, equitable, experiential and effective learning experiences for all young people, every single one of them. And I think that those words, those concepts describe the type of learning that Michael and I are talking about all the time, that we are advocating for, that we believe in. So beyond assessment, what does that architecture look like? What else is happening to try to bring this to life?

Timothy Knowles: Here, we need to move away from models of schooling singularly dependent on the Carnegie Unit or the credit hour. It was established in 1906 to standardize an utterly unstandardized educational sector. So it was a great plan in 1906. But since 1906, we’ve learned a great deal from learning scientists and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists about what knowledge is and how it’s acquired. So we need learning modalities that are truly competency or mastery based, whatever the language you want to use, that allow young people to solve real problems, that support experiential education, that enable them to work with mentors and experts and peers. The problem is not that we don’t know what this looks like. We do. Again, we can all point at examples of it. The problem is we haven’t figured out how to bring it to life at a scale that’s persuasive. Thing one for me is building, in essence, existence proofs and networks of existence proofs and amplifying and elevating them because this work is happening in ways that will generate momentum and attention. And I think we’re in an interesting moment where I’ve talked to 18 or 20 states in the last four months. State leaders, state chiefs, governors, they’re interested in how do we move to competency-based systems. There’s are opportunity windows open at the school system and state level, I think, post-pandemic that we have to leverage. And part of it is about cracking the Carnegie unit. Second thing I’d say is, and you may laugh me out of the podcast, which might be a first to be laughed out, but we need to think hard about learning experiences or curricula. And I know people feel like they’ve been down the curricular road before, but the tools and supports for teachers and students have to be taken into more careful consideration. The problem with the wave after wave of standards and accountability efforts over the last 40 years, and this is completely oversimplified, is that we thought if we cranked up the standards and tested for them on the back end, that somehow magically in the middle, the work that students and teachers would do every day would change. And I think the sort of governance reforms that led to charter schools were not that dissimilar. The theory being if we provided schools with flexibility and autonomy over hiring and money and use of time and governance, somehow the stuff that kids did every day would shift and we didn’t see that really occur. Part of the architecture demands building learning experiences for young people across disciplines, which are course-based, which are unit-based, which can come in different sizes to use that language, are much more engaging, much more experiential equitable and effective. So first thing is the Carnegie unit. Second thing is actually what gets taught. And the third thing is policy. The Carnegie unit has infiltrated much of our state-level policy, and I think we just assume that perhaps the states provide waivers so people can do what they want. Well they don’t. Seat time is the rule. That is the rule. Mastery or competency is not the rule. 990 hours of instructional time per annum, or some variation on 990 is the requirement for the vast majority of states. I’m a fan of guardrails, so I understand the argument that, “Well, you want to be careful about removing the guardrails.” But I’m not a fan of guardrails that don’t acknowledge what we’ve actually learned about learning over the last hundred years. And that’s the peril with this singular devotion to the conflation of time and learning. In my view, there’s a set of policy opportunities, if I was going to frame it in a more asset-based way, that I see. And there’s an appetite. And again, red states, blue states, both are interested. This is oversimplified, but I think the majority of the more conservative states that I talk to are interested in employment and access to jobs for young people who may otherwise leave their state. In the blue states, the interest is more about access and opportunity. But I think both are the same in this case, they’re fundamentally the same. Access and opportunity is really about employment, is really about social and economic mobility. I think there’s some more common ground, despite the kind of thrum of our national political discourse.

Michael Horn: I think you’re right. And I get super excited when you start talking about replacing this time-based unit – from the foundation that put it in place – with something much more meaningful and meaty. And it’s not surprising to me when I hear you – I want to use the word preaching – about this wisdom that you had to go and that you have. 

Timothy Knowles: Ouch

Michael Horn: Well, I want to yell “Preach!” But when I hear you say, “We ended up having to go to assessment,” that makes sense to me, because you have to replace the unit of time with something that is measuring progress in a different way. And so that makes sense. Now to switch gears completely, though, another part of the work — you’ve got your tentacles in a lot – another part of the work that you all do, and something that Diane and I have been talking a lot about on the show, is higher education, of course. And you all have a profound impact about how we think of the categorization of colleges and universities in this country. And you’ve made some big moves to change that. For our listeners that are less steeped in higher ed, can you tell us what the Carnegie classifications are in the first place, why they matter, why they have mattered, perhaps in the way that was not intended, and what you’re doing now with them to change those incentives?

Timothy Knowles: One of the things we do is we classify every postsecondary institution in the nation, almost all of them. There’s some that don’t submit data to the federal government, and so we don’t classify those, but something like 4500 institutions, we classify. Many of your listeners or some of your listeners may have heard of one of these classifications “research one” or “R1” classifications that comes from us. That spawned an arms race in terms of higher ed institutions aspiring to be R1 institutions and designated R1. Not just because of the One, but because the federal government follows it up with vast tranches of capital, of public capital. So there are real incentives to become an R1 that led to this arms race. So when I arrived at the foundation, the classifications had basically been spun off and had gone through very modest changes for 50 years. So since I got there, we’ve brought the classification…I’ve invented a new term, it’s called spinning on. We spun it back on and we brought them in house. Now with our partner, the American Council on Education, we’re trying to reimagine them from the ground up. So in 2025, all postsecondary institutions in the country will be classified in new ways. There’s lots of vectors of the work here, but one thing that I’m particularly excited about, and I hope will resonate with the kind of work we’re interested in on the K-12 side is developing a classification focused on the extent to which postsecondary institutions are engines of social and economic mobility. So every higher ed institution in the country will receive an economic mobility classification. So classification is distinct from a ranking. We’re not of the view that you can distinguish in credible ways between an institute number 599 and 600 on a list. Classifications are groups of institutions. So like institutions, in that sense, we’re less interested in naming names and creating another rank order. The primary aim here is to learn what institutions are doing to effectively accelerate social and economic mobility, to develop public policy that supports it. And just as R1s have been the recipients of large tranches of public capital, to drive public capital to those institutions that are accelerating economic mobility. So that’s that body of work. It’s fascinating because the big world doesn’t know much about it, but the higher ed world pays extraordinarily close attention to it. So two weeks ago I had a conference call with 1500 higher education leaders. That’s a third of them, or something close, which suggests how closely they’re paying attention. So we want to draw attention to one of the things that I think makes America and higher education great, which is the extent to which they’re actually making improvements in terms of young people from low-income backgrounds, first-generation young people, and underrepresented young people in particular.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, it’s really fascinating. It’s so interesting that a tool like that is visible to everyone. I mean, so many of the national rankings are based in part, like, if you look at their formulas, the beginning of the formula is this classification. So we all see it, but we don’t understand where it comes from. Super hopeful about the potential impact there. Okay, I have to squeeze one more thing in here before. This is like the speed round. But when I was in grad school, I learned about the Committee of Ten and the profound impact that they had. I’ve talked on this show about this before — Michael and I have talked about this — about how they really defined what the order and sequence of high school curricula was and put the sciences in order, alphabetically biology. So we did it that way for a really long time. You have launched something called the Carnegie Postsecondary Commission. So people should not be surprised to know there was a relationship with the foundation and that old committee. So you’ve launched a new commission. Tell us about it quickly.

Timothy Knowles: So sure. The Committee of Ten was founded in 1892. It was chaired by a guy called Charles Elliott, who was the president of Harvard at the time. Interestingly, and I didn’t actually know this until recently, Charles Elliott was charged by Andrew Carnegie to establish the foundation that I’m responsible for. So the congressional order that says we better create a nonprofit for this thing, the first signature on that congressional order is Charles Elliot. So it’s a very tangled web that we live and weave. So the postsecondary commission is a group of not ten, but seventeen K-12 and postsecondary leaders. My hope is that they become the Committee of Ten for this century that will be thinking hard again about the question of mobility and how we create not just K-12 and post secondary systems, but systems that might even become much more blurred. So K-16, K-to-work systems that are going to not try to reach consensus as a group, and they all signed up with this agreement. The aim is not consensus. The aim is to develop action papers that will provoke both thinking and policy, certainly, but then to help shape the work of the foundation, particularly on the post secondary side for the next decade for what I hope is my tenure. It’s a commission with institutional engine underneath it. It’s an extraordinary group of people. I won’t name them, but I would urge anybody who’s interested to go and look at our website and meet them because they are almost, to a person, first generation leaders who are doing exceptional things ranging from running large public systems to small colleges to K-12 systems serving young people who depend on the quality of school the most. It’s an extraordinary group. We just convened earlier last month, and the world should get ready.

Michael Horn: Well, with that tease, why don’t we leave the conversation there from a work perspective, but before people tune out, Tim, you’re joining us. Diane and I have this end of show segment where we talk about things we’re reading or watching, and we try to make them not about our work. We don’t always succeed, but we try. So can we ask you what’s on your watching, reading, listening list?

Diane Tavenner: Sure.

Timothy Knowles: I have a weird tradition. I read poetry from December 1 to the New Year because it makes me think differently. So, I’m right now, who am I reading? Haki Maributi, South Side of Chicago poet. Gwendolyn Brooks and W.H. Auden, not a South Side poet, so a mixture. But I find it takes me out of my day job and makes me think about the world and people and what I’m here for in different ways.

Michael Horn: I love this because poetry is one of those things I always wish there was time for. I never know how to fit it in. You may have just given an idea for not just me. So, Diane, what’s on your list?

Diane Tavenner: I’m going to go a little bit different this week. Coming off a time period where we had lots of family and fun friends around, I did a jigsaw puzzle this past weekend. Some special guests dropped in and helped put a few pieces in. It was so much fun. Makes your brain think differently. Very social. So that’s my, whatever, enjoyment of choice this week. How about you, Michael?
Michael Horn: I love that. That feels very COVID, I will tell you that, but I love it. Mine, I will go, I just finished the first season of The Morning Show with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston and have moved into season two and really enjoying it. It’s a complicated set of storylines that follow a little too closely, like real life in 2019–20 and so forth. And we’re getting into the COVID period right now, but it makes you think, it makes you laugh, it makes you cry, and it’s enjoyable. So that’s where I’ve been. And we’ll wrap it there. Tim, huge thank you for joining us, talking through all the initiatives that you all are doing at Carnegie. And for all of us, we will stay tuned. And for all of those listening, we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.

Twenty years later, the lack of child care still keeps millions of parents from entering or remaining in the workforce — and the pandemic has only exacerbated this issue. A Census Bureau survey found that in just the first two weeks of February, nearly people missed work to care for children who were not in day care, and it is the reason cited by who left the workforce during the COVID. In the last few years, over have closed, and many more still operate at a limited capacity. The crisis is especially acute in predominantly .

But an equally devastating consequence is that it makes enrolling in and finishing college nearly impossible for millions of parents. For mothers and fathers with low incomes, a postsecondary credential provides the most reliable pathway out of poverty. Yet for these parents, who are also disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and Latino, there is limited access to child care, both on and off campus.

This is one of the top reasons student parents are to complete a bachelor’s degree within five years than those without children. The college affordability gap is also wider for student parents — when the cost of child care is factored in, the out-of-pocket cost to attend a public college is often two to five times . of student-parents live near or below the poverty line, and high child care costs only add to their financial burdens. Underresourced families devote an to child care expenses; across the country, the cost of a spot at a child care center exceeds the average at a public four-year university. These exorbitant expenses can force parents to rely on makeshift forms of child care and prevent them from pursuing opportunities that could lead to higher earnings — like a degree. 

Recent bills like the American Rescue Plan Act show how adequate investment and policy can make a difference. Its temporary funds provided $39 billion in emergency support for child care, preventing some 3.2 million slots from disappearing. But without long-term solutions that address rising child care costs and declining access to quality care options, student-parents are likely fighting a battle with no end in sight. Families need policies that create a long-term impact and clear a pathway to economic mobility, including the possibility of earning a postsecondary credential. 

Higher education leaders and policymakers must rally around the success of student-parents and their children. One of the first steps should be collecting data on the parenting and caregiving statuses of students at colleges and universities. This is essential to improving college completion rates for student-parents. Without comprehensive data, it is impossible to understand the hurdles and barriers that prevent these students from attaining academic and professional success. 

Federal agencies such as the U.S. Children’s Bureau must increase funding for child care and back efforts to lower and stabilize the cost — particularly for services provided at community colleges and other colleges and universities that especially serve minority populations, which is where the largest share of student-parents can be found.

Policymakers and college leaders should also consider the benefits of two-generation educational programming — for example, providing student-parents with child care for their younger kids that ensures they are developmentally, academically, and emotionally prepared for kindergarten and beyond. Barriers to child care have multi-generational impacts felt most acutely by . Programming that solves child care concerns while providing early childhood development is critical, as it eases student-parents’ path to college completion while preparing their children for early academic success. Transforming colleges and universities into hubs for flexible, adaptable and strategically designed two-generation programming sets the stage for lasting ripple effects, helping parenting students and their families to thrive personally, academically and professionally.

Lastly, colleges must adopt practices that highlight the resources accessible on their campuses. They should encourage student-parents to share their experiences, as this will lead to an environment where those in similar situations feel supported and comfortable enough to seek assistance. In addition to offering basic aid, colleges and universities should also provide student-parents with information on career development opportunities and public assistance programs that would best fulfill their needs.

Finding the way out of the child care crisis will benefit millions of families, putting money back into the economy and making success stories like mine a lot more common. 

In the past, I used data that permitted one to determine the percentage of a college’s students born to low-income parents who by their 30s managed to reach earnings in the upper 40% of household income. This intergenerational measure of upward mobility is useful, but it gives little insight into the factors that help or hinder students’ access to a better life, such as how long it will take to pay off the cost of their education. The data also failed to spell out the extent, in comparison to other schools, to which each college promotes the mobility of low- and moderate-income students.

To address these concerns, this year I used an Economic Mobility Index (EMI) prepared for by Michael Itzkowitz, former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. The EMI ranks 1,320 bachelor’s degree-granting institutions by how well each provides economic mobility for its students. All the colleges in the 2023 NCAA women’s tournament are found in this index. 

To assess the degree of economic mobility the tournament schools provide their less-resourced students, the percentage of Pell Grant recipients (a proxy for low family income) at each college is multiplied by its percentile rank on return on investment (ROI) that the school offers these students versus other colleges.

The ROI itself is obtained from the total out-of-pocket cost of attaining a degree and how much more a bachelor’s recipient earns 10 years after enrolling in college than a high school graduate. For example, if a four-year college costs $60,000 and its graduates earn $15,000 more than they would have without a bachelor’s, it would take them approximately four years to recoup their education costs ($60,000 in costs divided by $15,000 in additional earnings). The result of multiplying a college’s percentile rank on its ROI for lower-income students by its proportion of such students determines its placement within the EMI. Therefore, the EMI captures both the proportion of underresourced students served and the strength of the return graduates receive from their educational investment.

The importance of these calculations is this: If a school provides a very strong ROI to lower-income students but enrolls mostly those from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, it cannot be said to be a good source of economic mobility. Therefore, the EMI rewards schools for both their proportion of lower- and moderate-income students and the additional ROI it provides them. 

This year’s national women’s champion, California State University-Sacramento, appears in the NCAA tournament for the first time. Although the Hornets lost to UCLA in the first round, the players gave it their all, as they did in winning the Big Sky Tournament. Sacramento State, one of only four California teams in the tournament, greatly deserves to be at the top of our Social Mobility Tournament Bracket. 

Of the 1,320 schools in the sample, Sac State ranks 19th with an EMI of 48.4%. And it does this while serving a student body with nearly 53% Pell Grant recipients, an amazing 15,200 of whom on average take just 1.2 years to pay down the total net cost of their education. Tom Hanks would surely be proud of his alma mater’s role in providing that measure of upward mobility to so many.

Rounding out our Final Four are the Rebels of UNLV, the Blue Raiders of Middle Tennessee and the Mocs of Chattanooga, all of whom unfortunately lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament. These schools, along with the University of South Florida and UCLA (which, sorry to say, faced Sacramento too early in our bracket) range in rank and EMI from 85th to 192nd and from 33.3% to 26.3%. To get to these figures, these schools enroll large numbers of disadvantaged students who on average can pay back the cost of their degree in 2½ years or less. With such a low opportunity cost, these students can attain family-sustaining earnings early in their working life. In effect, however exciting it is to win games — and exciting it is, indeed — these results are what ultimately matter most for the athletes, as few of them will ever be drafted by the WNBA. 

With college affordability top of mind, it bears digging a bit into the cost of the participating schools. The net price for lower-income students to earn a degree at Sac State is $26,700; at South Florida, it’s $25,000. As a flagship institution, UCLA charges an average of $10,000 more for its degree. For the top 17 teams on the Social Mobility Tournament bracket, the average cost of a degree is $35,800. Of course, these are mostly public universities, the schools most Americans count on to reach living-wage jobs. 

As for access, our top 17 colleges manage to serve over 127,000 Pell students. But adding in the next highest-performing 26 colleges in our bracket — those where, on average, the degree can be paid down in less than two years — means a whopping 1,222,600 Pell students are on the road to earning, on average, more than $30,000 per year than someone with only a high school diploma. These 26 additional schools have an average EMI of over 20%, and none have an EMI rank higher than 519th out of the 1,320 colleges in the index.

All in all, with minimal exceptions — such as the scrappy Pioneers of Sacred Heart, who rose past the NCAA’s First Four only to be felled by the Stanford Cardinal, and who, on average, take 5.6 years to pay for their degree — the schools in the tournament make it possible for their lower-income students to pay down the cost of their bachelor’s in less than three years. This is amazing, considering that 4 out of 10 schools in our database average well over 6½ years to do the same, and students at 264 of these schools take on average 14 years or more to earn back their investment in their education.

The school that wins the NCAA tournament trophy has every right to celebrate its prowess on the court. After all, it’s not easy to defeat six teams with winning records while millions watch. But colleges such as those making a run for the Social Mobility Tournament championship are also worthy of celebration for succeeding so well at helping thousands of disadvantaged students climb the earnings ladder leading to the American Dream of economic well-being. 

While we can’t wait to see who makes it to the Elite Eight and on to the Final Four, we look forward to the time when colleges that win in our parallel bracket, as Sac State has done, proudly announce on T-shirts, advertising and websites that they are “Income Mobility Champions.” 

March Madness is indeed a great escape, but social mobility is the great escape. 

Once again, March Madness has taken hold of much of the nation as this month’s NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament gets off the ground. As we have done over the past six years, we take this opportunity, when the nation is focused on figuring out which colleges produce the best basketball teams, to examine which of the participating schools are the best at preparing their students for life beyond college. 

We undertake this exercise by creating a parallel bracket — the Social Mobility Tournament Bracket — that plots the colleges invited to the Big Dance by how well or how poorly they help their students reach the American Dream of upward mobility. 

For most middle-class, traditional-aged college students, life after graduation can be a very scary time. If they have ended their studies, their scheduled and predictable life is abruptly interrupted by the start of an uncharted trajectory of adult responsibilities. Given that fewer than one senior in 75 playing in the tournament will be lucky enough to be drafted by an NBA team, this applies as well to most of the athletes eager to show their skills on the court this month.

For low-income students, often racial or ethnic minorities and frequently the first in their families to go to college, the challenges can be far greater. Consequently, while all schools are responsible for equipping their students with the skills, habits and knowledge they will need to have rewarding careers after graduation, those institutions serving low- and moderate-income students have an even greater obligation to make sure they are doing the right thing.

Schools that do well for their students should be recognized as true champions; colleges that fail to do so should be pointed out as needing improvement. It is with that mission in mind that each year we have created a parallel bracket of winners and losers, where economic mobility, rather than prowess on the court, is celebrated.

In years past, we have used the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights dataset to spotlight the extent to which disadvantaged students enrolled in the tournament’s colleges have managed to reach family-sustaining earnings by their early 30s. In particular, each school has been mapped on a bracket where winners and losers are determined through a mobility rate that represents the percentage of students born to parents in the bottom 40% of income distribution who reach earnings in the upper 40% of household income. 

While this comparison of achievement across generations has been useful, growing concern around college access, affordability and post-collegiate earnings has called for more comprehensive tools by which to understand the value of college for individuals and the nation. Consequently, beyond how well or how poorly schools help make intergenerational advancement possible, today it is important to know which colleges are worth their tuition cost in time and money; how long a student will have to work to pay off that cost; and what proportion of each college’s less-resourced students is being placed on the path to financial security.

With that in mind, we have used a new dataset for this year’s Social Mobility Tournament Bracket. This dataset was developed and analyzed by Michael Itzkowitz, former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. With these data, he created ‘s Economic Mobility Index (EMI) that ranks 1,320 bachelor’s degree-granting institutions by how well each provides economic mobility for its students.

Itzkowitz used publicly available information from the U.S. Department of Education and the Census Bureau to ascertain each college’s rank on the index. First, he determined the return on investment that lower-income students obtain at each of these 1,320 colleges, by calculating the out-of-pocket costs required to obtain a four-year degree. The EMI then considers the additional financial benefits students obtain by attending one of these schools. This earnings premium is defined as the additional income these graduates make in comparison to someone with only a high school diploma. In sum, the lower the out-of-pocket costs and the higher the earnings premium, the quicker a student will receive a return on the investment needed to obtain the degree.

The EMI also considers the proportion of lower- and moderate-income students a college enrolls. If the school provides a very strong ROI to lower-income students, but enrolls mostly students from upper-class backgrounds, it cannot be said to be doing a good job at providing economic mobility. Therefore, the EMI also rewards schools for the proportion of lower- and moderate-income students it enrolls in addition to the ROI it provides them.

In effect, this year, we are taking into consideration not only the percentage of students who move up the economic ladder, but also the size of the group of low- and moderate-income students a school places on the escalator to a better life. In doing so, colleges that rank highly in our updated bracket may be quite different from those that in the past would have made it to the Final Four and beyond.

For example, the Final Four in last year’s Social Mobility Tournament Bracket were Marquette, Providence, Notre Dame and Bryant. Compared with the other schools in the 2022 tournament, these had the highest percentages of students who climbed to the top 40% in earnings though their parents were in the lowest 40% of income. This feat is certainly admirable. But taking into consideration the relatively small number of low-income students who out-earned their parents, we find that these schools have had a very small impact as social mobility promoters. In fact, their EMI rank, respectively, is 558th, 844th, 925th and 1020th out of the 1,320 institutions in the index. 

As the parallel bracket shows, of the 32 teams making it past the first round, 27 are public colleges and universities. These are the workhorse schools providing students with many of the services and programs that can best lead to widespread upward mobility. And chief among their virtues is the reasonable net cost for their degrees, hovering on average around $39,000.

That leaves us with a Sweet Sixteen composed only of public colleges, the best of which make for an Elite Eight with EMI scores averaging 28.9% and all with an EMI rank above 346.

The Final Four in this year’s Social Mobility Tournament Bracket have EMI rankings worthy of detailed attention. The Houston Cougars — seeded No. 1 in the Midwest Region — have an impressive EMI score of 34.9% while ranking 67th in the index. Cougars can take pride in the fact that it takes them less than two years to earn the cost of their degree. Meanwhile, the Sun Devils at Arizona State, ranked 95th, on average pay back their undergraduate degree in a mere 1.2 years — and they do it with about 36% of their undergraduates on Pell Grants. UC-Santa Barbara’s Gauchos are not far behind, with a 106th ranking and a payback period of 1.6 years, and all while serving a student body where over a third are Pell Grant recipients.

That brings us to this year’s national champion, Florida Atlantic University. At 36%, the school has the highest EMI score among the tournament’s participants and ranks 63rd of the 1,320 colleges in the sample. This means two important things: On average, Florida Atlantic Owls take only one year to pay down the total net cost of their degree, and this feat is accomplished with an undergraduate population of nearly 39% low- to moderate-income students.

All in all, these winners in the race to provide the most mobility to the greatest number of students are worth celebrating and supporting no matter how well or poorly their teams may perform in the NCAA tournament. Colleges like these represent not only the best hope for tens of thousands of today’s most challenged students, but also the best answer for a nation hoping to prepare its residents to compete in a progressively polarized world.

A community ecosystem fuels success

The ecosystems in Midland and Longview are a point of distinction. Both have traditional support from organizations like the local Chamber of Commerce, which typically understand the importance of an educated workforce to help fuel the local business community. Yet in Midland, leaders from business, philanthropy, and education are actively advocating for improvement in their school system.

The, a collection of business and civic leaders and organizations, has become a catalyst in focusing the community on the trajectory of the Midland Independent School District. (Acknowledgement: Former Commerce Secretary, the Chairman of the Permian Strategic Partnership, chairs the board of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.) The PSP website acknowledges that: “The public schools in the Permian region compared to other areas of the state.” The site also makes clear that, “Our schools the next generation with access to highly qualified teachers and a robust curriculum.”

As happened in Dallas a decade ago, when leaders concerned about the city’s schools pushed for improvements, Midland’s education reformers are using outcome data broken apart by race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status and special education status to better understand where the school system is working for kids — and where it is not — to help identify solutions.

As one example, the reformers invited in the Partnership, the Dallas-based collective impact organization, to help the community better understand the depth of Midland’s educational shortcomings. “Data is a tool, not a weapon,” said Midland civic leader Ronnie Scott in emphasizing the need for quality data.

Civic leaders also researched regions that exhibited educational progress, including how they use charter schools to improve student achievement. Midland ISD trustees have taken advantage of a Texas law that allows charter operators to take over failing campuses.

For its part, Midland College is working to bolster the local K-12 system. Midland’s successful Early College High School, which earned an A on the state’s 2021-2022 rankings, sits on the Midland College campus. Also, the community college now offers a four-year degree .

Scott cites the latter move as key to Midland preparing more of its own teachers. Attracting talent to communities far away from Texas’ metropolitan areas is hard. But members of Midland’s active ecosystem contributed about $30 million in private funds to create this initiative.

Community volunteers like Christine Foreman are playing a key role, too. Raised in Midland, Foreman noticed Midland’s public schools had hit rock bottom several years ago. She took action by leading Midland ISD’s 2019 bond package, which Scott, a business executive, helped craft and supported publicly.

The election drew an impressive turnout of about 23,000 voters, but . Midland’s staunch anti-tax culture contributed to the defeat, as did an insufficient number of young people turning out to approve the package.

Mobilizing enough voters in a staunchly anti-tax city to support another new bond package is a tall but important task. A city that rightly prides itself on freedom and opportunity should appreciate how much quality public schools can expand the important guiding values of the community.

Most important, Midland’s business, civic and education leaders must keep playing the role of truth-tellers. The city once had a strong set of public schools. Now, it must rebuild them. That’s not an easy message to deliver, much less hear.

Longview leaders could learn from Midland’s example. Longview ISD has a commanding leader in James Wilcox, the district’s superintendent since 2007. Through his leadership, Longview took advantage of the same state law that Midland has used to create charter schools. Except in Longview’s case, Wilcox turned the state law, , inside out to make every one of Longview’s schools into a charter campus.

What the district needs now is a broad ecosystem, one that involves a range of organizations, leaders, and citizens in the conversation about Longview ISD’s path. Wilcox has set the vision, but widespread engagement will allow the district to build upon its progress over time — and ensure an eventual successful transition when Wilcox decides to retire.

A broad ecosystem also would help the entire 82,000-person city navigate through the maze of three school districts that serve Longview. Competitive tensions inevitably mount. A network of civic and business organizations could ensure the competition benefits the entire community.

And, as in Midland, Longview business, civic and education leaders must play the role of truth-tellers. In Longview’s case, the most recent A grade it received from the Texas Education Agency is a triumph. But it doesn’t mean that all students are having an A experience in terms of quality instruction and academic progress. The A campuses in Longview provide great opportunities to learn what interventions and approaches may better support students on lower-ranking campuses.

An innovative use of government programs

Wilcox has made International Baccalaureate curriculum and the development of Montessori schools a priority for Longview ISD. Research supports those approaches as strategies to stimulate early learning and prepare students for an education beyond high school.

The longtime superintendent is making his priority a reality through an unusual use of SB 1882. The law uses incentives to encourage districts to partner with nonprofit charters to turnaround struggling campuses. In return, the districts receive an increase in state funding for that campus.

Through Wilcox’s opportunistic use of SB 1882, all Longview ISD schools are now charter campuses. At the same time, the district is using the money from the law to finance the expansion of IB or Montessori programs, including training teachers in these models. (Not all Longview schools have one of those programs, but efforts are underway to spread them district-wide. Teachers are not currently required to be certified in IB or Montessori to be hired by the district.)

Although the three charter organizations operating in Longview have their own boards, Longview ISD essentially runs the schools since it employs the teachers and administrators in each charter. Autonomy is at the heart of charter schools, particularly autonomy around hiring, salaries, use of instructional time and curriculum. Autonomy in Longview is somewhat murky at present, particularly given the governance structure and the fact that teachers and principals are employees of the district, not the charters. Next year, when the charters come up for review, the district should run a competition to select the best charter operators, including being open to charter management operators who insist upon employing their own educators and administrators.

For its part, Midland is focused on strengthening early childhood education, teacher development, career and technical education, and long-range facility planning. Midland also has tapped into the innovations that external charter operators like and use to improve student learning.

Third Future Schools, launched by former Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles, redesigned once-failing Sam Houston Collegiate Preparatory Elementary with innovations like paying higher salaries based upon a teacher’s classroom performance, assigning apprentice teachers to nurture young educators, and using a curriculum that includes a concentration in the art of thinking. Sam Houston went from a F rating in 2018-2019 to a from the Texas Education Agency for the 2021-2022 school year.

In 2020, Public Schools opened the first , thanks to local foundations and leaders $55 million to fund the expansion of charters in Midland and Odessa. IDEA took over Travis Elementary School, a campus that the state gave a F grade in 2019. By contrast, TEA in 2022.

To its credit, IDEA focuses on the fundamentals of quality classroom instruction and developing effective teachers. The charter management organization notably offers a housing benefit to prospective teachers as part of its goal of developing a local pipeline of quality instructors.

As IDEA has shown with its progress in Midland, innovation need not be new. It may mean something as old-fashioned as strong instruction and a strong, welcoming culture for students.

Whether through a charter school or a traditional campus, Midland ISD will help prepare students for the world that awaits them by remaining open to innovative educational strategies.

Clear and inspired governance is key

The biggest governance challenge for Longview ISD is simplifying its unique but overlapping set of school boards. The district’s three charter operators have their own set of directors. But the charter operators eventually answer to Longview ISD’s school trustees and superintendent. Who, then, really is in charge?

Simplifying lines of authority would ensure the charters are not like a cautious driver looking back over their shoulder for approval from passengers in the backseat. Timidity leads to trouble, even danger. Longview students would be better served if the district remained the authorizing agent, while letting the charters manage their own work.

Giving quality charters freedom to operate, whether through rearranging school days, experimenting with curriculum, and using their own hiring and salary practices, has worked around the country. , Public Schools, and Public Schools provide three good examples.

The most important decision facing the Midland school board is hiring a superintendent to replace Angelica Ramsey, who decided in September to become Fort Worth ISD’s leader. She was hired to stabilize and advance the district after it had churned through two leaders without much progress. Ramsey was headed in the right direction by working closely with the Midland community, building the leadership capacity of principals and assistant principals, and staying on top of district data. The board would be smart to find someone with similar visionary instincts.

Midland voters elected 3 last month. The board has made strides toward concentrating on the most important variable: student performance. In fact, Scott and others credit trustees for being intent on improving the district, focusing on such priorities as attracting talented instructors to West Texas.

Trustees also have participated in Lone Star Governance, a Texas Education Agency spinoff that focuses on effective governance. But, as in other districts, board members need to know what to do with poor results and to stay the course once they find an evidenced-backed pathway. Parochial or minor matters can dominate school board’s discussions in any district — it is easy for board agendas to be filled with matters that have the gloss of relevance but lack any substantive impact on students.

Recommendations for Texas and lessons for beyond

As we saw in our look at Texas’ big metros as well as this look at our state’s smaller cities, adult leadership matters everywhere. Smaller cities and towns are, by definition, smaller ponds. Big fish can have outsized impact, to the good or the bad. Civic engagement and service is critical in small towns, particularly for those who want their hometowns to keep their homegrown talent.

Schools that prepare young people well for real local opportunity is a strong strategy for any Texas town. We recommend that leaders in smaller cities consider these recommendations when working to improve outcomes for all young people in their towns.

Show up and engage. In a smaller city, engagement by adults really matters. Citizens need to understand the outcome data and the community context, contribute to solutions with their time and treasure and vote in school board elections. Midland’s ecosystem is pushing forward with the priorities identified before their superintendent resigned for another role. The ecosystem in Longview is less well-organized and defined.

Distribute the leadership. Transitions will happen in the central office. In smaller cities, distributing responsibility and information across district leaders ensures that improvements work and a focus on goals continues even when leadership may change

Take advantage of charters and SB 1882. As both districts show, partnering with charters through brought new approaches to struggling campuses — and generated revenue for the districts. District-charter partnerships provide opportunities for learning and innovation when executed with fidelity. Taking advantage of policies like SB 1882 can help smaller cities access new ideas and resources.

Use the data. There is no way around using student outcome data to measure progress. It is impossible to meaningfully improve outcomes for students without using comparable data to understand who is on track and who is lagging. Tests are not solutions in and of themselves. They are simply the tool that helps illustrate academic progress. Breaking apart that data to understand what is happening on each campus and within each subgroup of students is also important to know if all students in the district are having comparable experiences.

The Texas miracle of economic growth and opportunity is both tantalizing and sobering. Texas is the fastest-growing state in the union per the 2020 Census. People of color account for 95% of that population growth, and we need everyone in the state to have opportunity within reach for our state to thrive. We know that the progress made by Texas students through the 1990s and 2000s stalled before the pandemic — and that stall became a major crash for far too many young people thrown off track by COVID-19 disruptions to school and home.

Recovery for today’s students is not a lost cause. Texas can still cultivate and benefit from the collective ingenuity, knowledge, and leadership of our young people if adults stay the course to build and support school systems that work for all students. Adult leadership and vision matter now, more than ever.

Towering metropolitan populations dominate the storyline of modern Texas. The 13 largest cities in the United States include five from Texas: Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin and Fort Worth. The Texas Triangle, a megaregion in the middle of the state that includes those five main urban centers, is home to nearly 21 million of the state’s 28.6 million residents. The rest of the state’s 7.5 million residents — still greater than the population of 30 smaller states — live in rural areas, small towns and moderately sized cities.

The foundation of the state — and often its mythic image — rests in the vast stretches of land far from the office towers of Texas’ urban and suburban skylines. No regions of the state capture more of that heritage than West Texas and East Texas. They provided the oil, cattle, timber and cotton that allowed a frontier state to eventually develop an economy that would rank ninth in the world if Texas were a nation.

We chose Midland and Longview, two longstanding Texas communities that help anchor West and East Texas, respectively, for a closer look at opportunity in Texas beyond the state’s urban core. Both cities sit in growing counties in our fast-growing state, according to the 2020 Census. (Midland County grew over 24% over the last decade, Gregg County grew a more modest 2%.) They are also blessed with young people. Will those young people stay in their cities? Will they be well prepared for opportunities?

Midland sits 325 miles west from Dallas/Fort Worth in the center of the oil-rich Permian Basin. The city’s thriving energy industry long has attracted pioneering entrepreneurs and educated professionals to its windswept plains. None have been more prominent than a young George H.W. Bush, and his wife Barbara Bush, who arrived after World War II in search of opportunity.

Midland continues to attract college-educated engineers, geologists and executives, at least more so than neighboring Odessa. Yet the boom-and-bust cycles that roil the energy industry require Permian Basin residents to retool themselves — or become unemployed — when downturns hit.

Longview became an industrial hub in the Piney Woods of Texas after long-ago becoming a center for shipping cotton and timber. The East Texas town also capitalized on the discovery of the nearby East Texas Oil Field in the 1930s. Fortunes were made from that field, benefitting towns and families across East Texas.

Today, Longview houses a number of manufacturing operations, but only about 22% of the town’s population has a . By contrast, the state average for a bachelor’s degree or higher is almost 31%.

These communities face the same question that big cities like Dallas, Houston and Austin encounter with their school districts: How do they best prepare students for a meaningful life in the modern workforce?

Towns like Midland, with its 176,000 people, and Longview, with its 82,000 people, need to grow their own talent to become their communities’ next teachers, doctors and entrepreneurs. Big cities have more people moving in, but the futures of Midland and Longview are tied to how well they can prepare their young people for opportunities in adulthood.

This urban-rural dynamic plays itself out across America, no matter a state’s size. As people flock to cities, what happens to the communities they leave behind? What happens to their workers, their families, their children? What becomes of their institutions, not the least of which are their schools? Look at any state in the union, and this story applies.

What data says about Midland ISD and Longview ISD

As the energy capital of the Permian Basin, Midland is a major force in world energy markets. As of June 2022, the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank , the Permian Basin produced almost 44% of the nation’s oil and about 17% of its natural gas.

The production is vital to the economies of Midland and the nation. Yet the roller coaster nature of the energy industry means that Midland’s schools must continually produce innovative students who can help their community adapt to financial booms-and-busts.

Young families once knew they could place their children in a Midland public school and their education would ready them for the world. In the ensuing decades, the community continued to provide a decent education at a below-average cost.

Now, student performance in the Midland Independent School District shows something different.

In the 2018-2019 school year, the Texas Education Agency gave in the agency’s A-F annual rankings of public schools. The earned only mediocre marks for overall student achievement on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness exams. Its students demonstrated marginal year-over-year progress on the annual tests. And the state ranked twice as many Midland ISD schools as failing compared to the previous year.

Fast forward three years, Midland ISD students improved on the As a whole, the district of 26,387 students moved from a C rating in 2019, the last year TEA handed out letter grades, to a B for the 2021-2022 school year. The progress is encouraging, especially given the pandemic’s impact on students.

Similarly, Midland ISD educators should celebrate that their students improved in reading in grades three through eight. And across all subgroups of students, whether by race, income or English proficiency, the district met the state’s target for .

Still, Midland’s overall B rating sits on the border between a B and a C. The district barely scooted by with a numerical score of 80 out of 100 to claim that B grade. In part, that is because on the state’s expectations on all STAAR exams, trailing the Texas state average of 48%.

The “meets” mark is critical because it means that students are able, as TEA reports, to “generally demonstrate the ability to think critically and apply grade-level knowledge and skills in familiar contexts.” In Midland’s case, 58% of the district’s students are not showing they can apply their knowledge in a way that is appropriate for their grade level.

Longview ISD is also showing some signs of improvement, but not all of the East Texas district’s metrics are encouraging. Like Midland ISD, Longview can’t claim victory.

The big headline is that the district of 8,223 students earned a coveted A from the state for the 2021-2022 academic year. That top mark was up from a B in 2018-2019. Equally encouraging is that Longview students beat the state average on all STAAR exams except for social studies.

Of course, trumping a fairly low state average is not a major victory. It is particularly troubling that only 44% of Longview ISD’s Black students, who make up 34.5% of the Longview student body, . Their passing rate trails the average passing rate for all Longview ISD students by 10 points.

While it is good that Longview earned an A rating, an A rating may not mean an A experience for all of a district’s students. And Midland’s B rating is a positive sign of growth, but it also does not mean a B experience for every student.

As we saw in our study of Dallas, Austin and Houston, strong high school graduation rates do not guarantee future success.

The charts below illustrate the challenge facing young people in Midland County and Gregg County, in which Longview is located. Third-grade reading scores show gaps by race and ethnicity — gaps that appear to be largely eliminated when we consider high school graduation rates across those same racial groups. Maddeningly, however, those gaps reappear across higher education attainment and wage measures.

A proxy graduate profile shows that many students were well behind on reading in third grade and math in eighth grade, but a high percentage of students graduated from high school. This begs the question, were they truly prepared for opportunity and their next step, or did we set them up to fail by passing them along in the system?

In our next article, we will examine how the governance and leadership of these two mid-size districts impacts student learning, how well the districts use innovations and fundamentals to improve student outcomes, and the degree to which the community ecosystems support and drive school progress. We also will provide recommendations on how Midland ISD and Longview ISD can best deal with the realities they confront.

For now, we conclude with the voices of students who explain their experiences in Midland and Longview. Their voices are the most important ones, after all. Their opportunity to enjoy a meaningful, purposeful life is at stake.

by Harvard economist and his colleagues show that friendships and other relationships across socioeconomic lines experienced in places like schools and the workforce play a key role in boosting upward mobility and expanding opportunity in America.

These community-level relationships, what the researchers call social capital, produce economic connectedness, which contrasts with friending bias, or people’s tendency to stay within the social class networks they know, associating with people like themselves.

The analysis is based on 72.2 million U.S. Facebook users, representing 84% of U.S. adults, ages 25 to 44, with 21 billion friendships. It includes a where entering a zip code, high school or college shows the degree these cross-class friendships exist in communities and schools across the country.

Economic connectedness is among the strongest predictors of upward income mobility, stronger than measures like school quality, job availability, family structure or a community’s racial makeup.

For example, low-income children growing up in a neighborhood where 70% of their friends are wealthy increase their future incomes on average by 20%, similar to the effect of attending two or so years of college.

These cross-class friendships are important because of their : Through them, individuals acquire new information about things like careers and educational options, learn how to interact with new people in different settings and have other experiences that shape their aspirations and behaviors, which have a multiplier effect over time.

These friendships vary across schools, even within neighboring schools with similar socioeconomic makeups. Large high schools have fewer cross-class and more income-related groupings. So do schools with high Advanced Placement enrollment and gifted-and-talented classes.

Conversely, smaller schools generally have , or more social interaction between students from different backgrounds. Finally, colleges with greater racial diversity and larger student enrollments generally have more friending bias, or .

There are ways to reduce friending bias and increase social interactions or cross-class friendships between students. Here are three examples.

The first is from Chetty and his colleagues, who cite large high schools with diverse student bodies that assigned students to smaller, more diverse houses or groups.

The second comes from my colleague Jeff Dean, who analyzed the 214 charter high schools found in the who have friending bias scores. He found that, on average, charter schools perform better than 80% of traditional public schools on friending bias, raising questions for further research. For example, do the autonomy and community-building aspects of charter schools contribute to this? If so, are there lessons learned that district schools could emulate? Should charter school growth limits be lifted so more of these schools can be created? 

The third suggestion is inspired by comments Chetty and his colleagues make about creating new or expanding existing programs that promote cross-class interactions. I believe another promising way to promote cross-class friendships is by expanding career pathways education and training programs. These acquaint learners with employers and workforce demands, engaging students and adult mentors from diverse classes and backgrounds. This creates new social networks and information sources that can shape a young person’s downstream expectations and aspirations.

These programs weave together education, training, employment, support services and job placement. They include a wide range of models: apprenticeships and internships; career and technical education; dual enrollment in high school and college; career academies; boot camps for acquiring specific knowledge or skills; and staffing, placement and other support services for job seekers.

There are state-level partnership programs in places as politically diverse as , , , , and . Other partnerships are local and feature collaborations among K-12 schools, employers and civic partners like in Atlanta; in New Orleans; Washington, D.C.’s ; , a network of 38 Catholic high schools in 24 states; and and in Los Angeles County, awarding associate or bachelor’s degrees through UCLA Extension and El Camino College or .

Support is provided to those creating new programs by national organizations like the , and the .

These diverse programs have five common features: an academic curriculum linked with labor market needs leading to a recognized credential and decent income; career exposure and work, including engagement with and supervision by adults; advisers helping participants make informed choices, ensuring they complete the program; a written civic compact among employers, trade associations and community partners; and supportive local, state and federal policies that make these programs possible.

These initiatives are different from the old high school vocational education that tracked students into occupations based on family backgrounds and other demographic characteristics. They foster by offering individuals many pathways to work, career and successful lives.

The pathways approach helps students develop a practical sense of what it means to work in a specific job — an — and a more general sense of their values, personalities and abilities, or . It also can yield routes to jobs and careers.

The bottom line is that there’s no replacement for the education system’s important face-to-face role in nurturing cross-class friendships and professional connections.  

That’s a welcome back-to-school message.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to �鶹��Ʒ.

But here at �鶹��Ʒ, we thought we’d use the occasion of March Madness to celebrate top schools for an entirely different reason — elevating graduates into the workforce and empowering social mobility. 

Colleges vary widely in how well they set graduates up for career success and aid them in climbing the “income ladder.” Recently Jorge Klor de Alva, president of the Nexus Research and Policy Center, worked with the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights dataset to match and analyze data from thousands of colleges as well as millions of income tax returns to determine every school’s ability to take students born to parents in the bottom 40 percent of income distribution and to help them go on to achieve earnings in the upper 40 percent of household income by their early 30s. 

By identifying the percentage of students who made this ascension, Klor de Alva was able to compare schools in an apples-to-apples fashion in a reimagined March Madness bracket. 

“A score of 0.50 on our bracket means 50 percent of students whose parents were in the lowest 40 percent were able to climb to the top 40 percent in earnings,” he wrote in a recent essay. “Our Social Mobility Tournament Bracket spotlights the extent to which disadvantaged students enrolled in the selected colleges have managed to reach family-sustaining earnings 10 years after leaving the school.” 

As we enter Sweet 16 weekend, here’s what the finalists would look like if used Klor de Alva’s social mobility percentages to determine winners: 

In real life, Bryant University’s basketball team lost their First Four game and failed to progress in the brackets. But, after seeing our “Social Mobility Tournament,” Bryant would be the 2022 contest winner if the focus was celebrating schools that helped students prosper.

For context, here’s the full March Madness bracket, scored by social mobility percentage (click to enlarge): 

Of note: UCLA, which previously won our Social Mobility Tournament in 2017, makes it all the way the Social Mobility Sweet 16 before being knocked out by Wisconsin’s Marquette University. 

To learn more about the calculations, the rationale and the importance of celebrating schools in moving students up the ladder, read Klor de Alva’s deep dive right here.

As the nation’s concerns about the pandemic are moved to the back burner by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it may seem insensitive to turn our attention to sports. But sports are important. From kindergarten through college, participation in sports helps develop vital human values, from the ability to work in teams to the willingness to sacrifice oneself in the pursuit of common goals. Sports build friendships across diverse peoples and help develop resilience in the face of disappointment. So, with no apologies, millions of sports fans deserve the distraction that comes with this month’s NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament.

After fighting off the winter’s variant of COVID-19 and with the first four games completed, the 68 colleges selected to compete have started battling each other for the national championship. Unlike last year, where it all took place in a limited number of sanitized bubbles, this time the venues will include multiple cities with stadiums filled with cheerleaders, fans and bands whose frenzy is so much a part of March Madness.

All this means it’s time for us to join in with our own alternative bracket. Since 2017, each year we have prepared a bracket that plots the tournament’s colleges based on how well each participating school helps its students reach the American Dream of upward mobility. In effect, our parallel bracket charts the schools not by what they could be expected to do on the court, but by what they are already doing to improve their students’ chances to succeed in life. 

Our Social Mobility Tournament Bracket spotlights the extent to which disadvantaged students enrolled in the selected colleges have managed to reach family-sustaining earnings 10 years after leaving the school. To examine how well or how poorly these colleges put their students on the path to financial security, we use the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights dataset. By combining millions of anonymous income tax returns with information on thousands of American colleges, these data permit us to map each school in the tournament on a bracket where winners and losers are determined through a mobility rate that represents the percentage of a school’s students born to parents in the bottom 40 percent of income distribution who reach earnings in the upper 40 percent of household income by their early 30s. Put another way, a score of 0.50 on our bracket means 50 percent of students whose parents were in the lowest 40 percent were able to climb to the top 40 percent in earnings.

Based on this year’s March Madness picks, the schools to watch in our Social Mobility Tournament Bracket are Marquette, Providence, Bryant and Notre Dame. While the Bulldogs and the Fighting Irish began the tournament in the lowly First Four rung, in our bracket, Bryant University (0.78) and Notre Dame (0.74) reached our Final Four, with Bryant the overall Champion.  

We believe our Social Mobility Tournament Bracket is significant because it has never been more important to know whether the time and money spent on college is worth it. As we have noted before, the American Dream — a big part of which rests on children doing better than their parents — has become progressively more elusive. For example, children born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of outearning their parents, but only half of Millennials can expect the same. Members of Gen Z, those 18 to 25 who make up the bulk of today’s undergraduate cohort, are likely to find it even more difficult. According to recent estimates, as many as 63 percent of them report that receiving an inheritance will be essential to securing their financial future.

It is no surprise, then, that as the public has started to question the value of a college degree — given increasing tuition costs, low graduation rates and underemployment among graduates — the importance of knowing what an education can yield at a particular college or with a specific degree has become more important than at any time in the nation’s history. Fortunately, for all who see postsecondary education as the way to a better life, since 2015 the U.S. Department of Education, through its , has made earnings data publicly available for students — whether they graduated or not — from nearly all institutions. Today, College Scorecard data track earnings not just by school, but by both degree and field of study six, eight or 10 years after students enroll.

Using these data, researchers have estimated the return on investment in education at thousands of colleges. This endeavor is making comparisons between schools more meaningful. For example, armed with these resources, we now know that approximately 14 percent of postsecondary institutions leave their students in such bad straits that they will never be able to gain back their cost of attendance. Meanwhile, because of high dropout rates, researchers have estimated that at about 30 percent of colleges, more than 50 percent of students will still be earning less than a high school graduate a decade after enrollment.

Nonetheless, all universities claim their students will be able to maneuver well the intricacies of their education, and all assert that what their students are taught will add up to a great job and a fulfilling career. But for those students whose parents are in the lowest two quintiles of income distribution, the likelihood that they will climb the ladder to financial success greatly depends on where they go to school. And how well that school performs on the basketball court is no indication of how much its students will earn compared to their parents. 

This is true even for the outstanding players who are demonstrating their basketball prowess on TV screens across America this week and through the championship game April 4. Only a small number will be able to make money from participating in March Madness; in fact, fewer than one senior in 75 playing in the tournament will be lucky enough to be drafted by an NBA team. For most of these athletes, what matters most for their financial security is something beyond basketball.

With that in mind, we offer our alternative rankings with the hope that they can help draw attention to those colleges that work hardest at putting their low-income students on the ladder to a life-transforming future of financial well-being. With scores ranging from 0.73 to 0.78, meaning over 70 percent of their low-income students advanced to the top 40 percent of earners, we heartily congratulate our Final Four. And a special shout out goes to Northeast Conference Champion Bryant University on its crowning as Social Mobility Tournament champion on its first appearance in the Division I level NCAA tournament!

Jorge Klor de Alva is the president of the Nexus Research and Policy Center. He was previously a senior executive at Apollo Education Group, Inc., a professor at Princeton University, and the Class of 1940 Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Loans were repeatedly described as a “lifetime sentence” in interviews with 100 degree holders. For those enrolled in income-driven enrollment plans that stretch on for upwards of 20 years, growing balances are “shackles on their ankle,” and “like Jim Crow,” with virtually no chance of total repayment.

Health scares, job insecurity and refinancing homes or vehicles with high debt-to-income ratios have derailed borrowers’ futures and compounded stress, according to the , “Jim Crow Debt: How Black Borrowers Experience Student Loans”. Many feared the only way out from under would be, “taking it to my grave” or “when I die.”

Many of the 1,300 Black student loan borrowers are unable to access economic freedom because of their debt. An overwhelming majority cannot sustain savings, according to the advocacy nonprofit.

The majority, 66 percent, regret taking loans in the first place. Only in income-driven plans — of 2 million who’ve made payments for over 20 years — have ever had loans cancelled.

It’s been that Black students — who because of , are unable to tap into generational wealth — borrow more and repay at slower rates than peers of other races. 

This report is the first national look at the day-day toll that debt has on Black families. 

It’s also the first to explore borrower-identified policy solutions, like doubling federal Pell Grants, lower interest rates and realistic debt cancellation. 

“This is not about individuals making the wrong choices, because they didn’t have good choices to make,” said Victoria Jackson, Education Trust’s federal and state policy lead on college affordability.

Attempting to get loans forgiven through existing programs is also nearly impossible, graduates say.  

One borrower, named Georgia for anonymity, took out $24,000 in 1990 and owes $125,000 today.

“I have worked at a nonprofit for 27 years and have tried to work with my multiple loan servicers to get public service forgiveness. I only get the runaround,” said Georgia, who like 72 percent of those surveyed by the Education Trust, is enrolled in an income-driven plan. 

“I tried the Department of Education, my Congress members,” she said. “I am 62 years old and do not know how I will retire.” 

Researcher and co-author Jailil Mustaffa Bishop said student loan policy debates are always “based on Black people’s data, but not really involving actual Black people. We weren’t hearing how Black borrowers were framing their problems and expressing the solution.”

Whether by coincidence or fate, the timing of their project “collided” with national discussions around debt cancellation and the urgent need to reform college affordability.

No ‘good choices’: How policy enables a lifetime of debt

Like many other borrowers, Georgia, struggling to retire, said she received confusing information as to which loans qualified for public service forgiveness or income-driven-repayment. 

With lower monthly payments and cancellation promised after about 25 years, she chose an IDR plan. Thirty-one years later, she has not had any student loans forgiven and her balance has compounded. 

Her experience mirrors that of 2 million borrowers who’ve . A mountain of red tape and convoluted paperwork stands to keep borrowers in “lifetime sentences.” 

Intended as a temporary strategy to help borrowers pay down balances post-college, IDR plans rolled out in 1995. Borrowers pay smaller balances, based on income, and debt spreads out over 20-25 years as opposed to the original 10. 

Once borrowers are back on track, perhaps with higher paying career moves years after graduating, they can go back to standard payment plans. 

But getting “back on track” to paying off the original loan has proven impossible, particularly for Black borrowers, with mounting costs of living, racial wealth gaps and stagnant wages. 

“[An IDR plan] provides immediate relief, but it doesn’t offer a solution to borrowers who are looking at a potential lifetime death sentence, as many Black borrowers in our study described … It just offers a way for them to kind of manage that debt, but not really a solution to pay it off,” co-author Bishop said.

Today, IDR is touted as the primary solution to the student debt crisis, over cancellation or forgiveness.

Yet those in IDR plans rarely see balances go down, only mount with interest. The high debts harm borrowers’ chances of buying homes, renting apartments or accessing credit lines — even more so than those with typical student loan plans. 

“Those in the study that were actually enrolled in an IDR plan … more frequently reported that loans were a source of financial stress. They had a negative impact on their overall mental health, as well as a negative impact on their quality of life,” Education Trust researcher and report co-author Jonathan Davis said. 

About a third of graduates surveyed even postponed having a child because of their student loan debt; about half have put off retirement savings. 

Even more striking, 67 percent of those earning $75-100,000 delayed buying a home because of their student loan debt. The number is nearly just as high, 61 percent, for those with graduate degrees, in theory, better positioned in their careers.  

Chronicling the human toll behind current federal loan policies, the report makes the case for race-conscious reform. 

The future of loan policy, as told by borrowers

“I mean, realistically, I think the [student loan] system is working exactly as we expect it to … no one’s surprised that we somehow built a financial aid process and policy and set that up to only consider your annual salary, as if [Black people] all have the same net assets,” one borrower said.

First and foremost among the solutions, with 80 percent surveyed in support, is wide scale debt cancellation. 

Researchers told �鶹��Ʒ that when it came time for cancellation through IDR plans or public service loan forgiveness — which — Black borrowers were often disqualified because of technicalities.

Jalil Mustaffa Bishop said the administrative process is intentionally difficult, similar to bankruptcy filing. 

“There’s a lot of clauses, really it means that a borrower has one misstep that may derail their whole repayment strategy. And that’s also a part of the design … that was built into student loans to make it really hard to get from under this debt. We should see that as a decision that was made, not just kind of an accident that came into being.” 

Common proposals cap forgiveness at $10,000 or suggest “means-testing”, or limiting who is eligible, for example, to those making under $100,000. Yet Black graduates experience greater wealth gaps and higher debt than any of their peers. 

Limits or caps on forgiveness would “disproportionately exclude Black borrowers.” They’re more likely to have high balances and take on graduate school debt to “hedge against discrimination” in the workforce, the report cautions. They’re also least likely to amass wealth long term because of systemic racism. 

Four years after graduation, Black graduates typically owe as white graduates — a result of racial , and needing more in loans because of generational wealth gaps.

Borrowers and , currently capped at $6,495 annually. The increase would entirely eliminate the need for federal student loans for about 75 percent of families living in poverty, and 85 percent of low-income Black families.  

For years, funding declines drove up university tuition as wages stayed stagnant. Accordingly, fewer and fewer families can afford higher education.

And “the purchasing power of the Pell Grant, the nation’s most important college grant, has declined significantly,” Education Trust policy expert Jackson said.

The National Study on Black Student Loans research team will roll out more reports on specific populations and issues within the student debt crisis, like Black women and parent borrowers. They’re also in the process of building a data hub for students, policymakers and advocates to explore research, solutions and students’ lived experiences. 

Black borrowers’ experiences also point to a need for transparent loan counseling, particularly when facing income-driven plans that compound for decades with lower monthly payments.

“We still found that those in plans — that by design are supposed to help you better manage your loan repayments — are unable to afford basic necessities like food, rent, healthcare, contributing to saving, childcare… We want to humanize that. While these plans by intent were designed to do one thing for black borrowers in our study, they have not yet proved to meet that intention,” report co-author Jonathan Davis said.

Disclosure: Marianna McMurdock was an intern at the Education Trust-West in the summer of 2020. 

To be more precise: Our annual “Social Mobility Tournament” is compiled by Nexus Research and Policy Center President Jorge Klor de Alva and uses the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights dataset to capture a different view of higher education institutions, combining millions of anonymous income tax returns with information on thousands of American colleges. As Klor de Alva explains, he assigns a score to each school in the tournament “using a mobility rate that represents the percentage of its students born to parents in the bottom 40 percent of income distribution who reach earnings in the upper 40 percent of household income by their early 30s.”

The goal here is a different kind of bracketology — to create “a parallel competition that plots the tournament’s participating colleges on a bracket based on how well each school helps its students reach the American Dream of upward mobility. Over the years, our bracket has served to highlight how well or how poorly colleges in the tournament have managed to place their most disadvantaged students on the road to family-sustaining earnings, as opposed to how well their players have done on the court.”

With this year’s Sweet Sixteen set to kick off at Saturday afternoon, as the Oregon State Beavers take on the Loyola Ramblers, we’ve taken our full 68-college Social Mobility Bracket and broken out which schools would make our Sweet Sixteen, our Elite Eight, and our Final Four. Here are our 2021 victors for social mobility:

And for those wondering how the other top schools in the tournament did in serving more than 1.5 million students, here’s a copy of our complete 2021 bracket:

Klor de Alva has noted several interesting trends and observations from this year’s participants — and results. “The 68 schools participating in this year’s March Madness have succeeded in making the intergenerational income leap possible for about 109,000 students out of their total student population of over 1.5 million,” he noted, “a somewhat disappointing 7 percent.”

Two years ago, when they last held the tournament, that figure was 11 percent. Read Klor de Alva’s full assessment of the 2021 social mobility tournament — and why such a conversation is essential when we consider the purpose and the payoff of our higher education system.

Click here to read his complete 2021 assessment: