The promise of a college education operates on the belief that all students have equal opportunity for upward mobility. But the benefits of attaining a postsecondary credential are significantly shaped by students’ racial and economic backgrounds, as
well as the colleges they attend.
Instead of being a “great equalizer,” the American higher education system too often exacerbates these underlying racial and economic inequities.
In recent years, growing attention has focused on assessing the value of a college education. Current approaches like measuring debt relative to earnings or assessing the earnings premium potential of a postsecondary degree are useful in determining whether
individual institutions and academic programs are economically benefiting college graduates. But these approaches have one major limitation: they fail to explicitly center race.
Economic indicators, like earnings and debt alone, are incomplete measures of college value for communities of color. While the federal Pell Grant is a reasonable proxy for determining family wealth, it fails to capture economic disparities by race. Additionally,
Pell does not capture all students from low-income backgrounds, especially those with mixed family statuses or students who do not complete their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).
In this brief, we explicitly racialize economic mobility. Using the proposed race and economic mobility (REM) metric, we found at institutions serving the greatest shares of students of color (aggregated) and Black students, students earn nearly double
their family income, after a decade of entering college. However, they earn $8,000 less and owe nearly the same (or more) of their original loan amount, compared to their peers that attend institutions with the smallest share of these respective student
groups. The data revealed more complex findings for institutions’ composition of Latinx students.
By racializing economic mobility, the REM metric seeks to build upon important discussions about the true value of a college education for different populations of students by race, family income, and geography. Using data from the College Scorecard,
this brief introduces the REM approach and opens additional opportunities to investigate the data by region and sector. The approach also supports ongoing advocacy efforts to equitably invest in both students of color and institutions serving large
shares of racially marginalized students as well as to improve equitable data collection and reporting.
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