“Some developments — in admissions, business models, college rankings, and more — are still just emerging.” …
I agree that more colleges & universities will become test optional for the same reason that the SAT added a writing portion to the test. Harvard may do so if the current lawsuit brought by Asian students is successful.
Interesting. Ranking colleges on the issue of social mobility is one fraught with issues. If many top Asian and URM candidates are also upper middle class too, that’s an issue. Higher income level students will become less attractive as they will not have the ability to move up to any degree.
And schools with business, cs and engineering have the greatest potential to move up. Which is great. But someone has to be a scholar, a nurse, soldier, teacher, not for profit employee or social worker.
Those noble enterprises are not known for the same income levels to move an average for a school. So they become devalued at the insitutional level as they hurt the school rankings and competitiveness in the college marketplace. Universities have some utility to the culture and fabric of a country beyond pure economic outcomes.
However, scholars, nurses, military officers, teachers, many kinds of employees of non-profits (e.g. university staff, hospital physicians and other staff, etc.) and social workers could be considered upwardly mobile (in both income and other ways) if they came from lower income families headed by parents in lower skill and education jobs.
Indeed, if you get away from the demographics of colleges focused on in these forums (where half of the students come from top 3% income families), such professions are probably upward mobility for a large percentage of college students.
It will depend on what they consider upward mobility. Two teachers in my area make 120k a year together. They aren’t Bill Gates, but for this purpose ther children are in the rich category. And social workers make 50k a year, so their child would be a negative in this evaluation if they chose this career. Going backwards.
Solidly middle class. The biggest group in our nation. So I guess upward mobility only counts if you are below middle class. Which is fine. But it’s going to get more confusing than ever.
And how long will they wait to measure. If someone goes to med school or grad school or PhD route they will ruin the averages.
$120k per year is about double the median household income (and about the 79th percentile according to https://dqydj.com/united-states-household-income-brackets-percentiles/ ), so obviously there is more room for downward mobility than upward mobility from that family background.