California, New York, and Texas Top the EMI Again in 2024

In 2022, Third Way introduced the Economic Mobility Index (EMI) to provide a new way to rate institutions of higher education based on their student outcomes. While traditional college rankings often favor prestige over an institution's commitment to enrolling the most vulnerable students and providing them with economic opportunities, Third Way factored in the net price low-income students pay at their respective institutions, those low-income students’ post-college earnings, and the proportion of Pell Grant recipients the institution serves. 

Including these variables completely changes the institutions consumers see highlighted in the ratings. For example, the most recent US News & World Report college ranking lists Princeton as the top institution in the country, but our EMI shows that California State University-Los Angeles reigns supreme at providing economic mobility to students when factoring in the costs, outcomes, and percentage of Pell recipients each of these institutions enroll. However, Princeton is often highlighted in the media, while many never hear about California State University-Los Angeles. 

We quickly saw that CSU-Los Angeles wasn’t an anomaly and that many schools that performed well on the EMI are from the same state systems of public institutions. For the past three years, California, New York, and Texas have topped the list for providing economic mobility to low-income students based on our EMI. The 2024 EMI reveals that these states are still leading the pack in serving their most marginalized students. 

Within the top 25 institutions on the 2024 EMI, 76% are in California, New York, or Texas. Additionally, several of these institutions belong to just two state systems—the California State University system (10 institutions) and the City University of New York system (six institutions). In these systems, institutions are keeping costs low for low-income students, leading low-income students to quality jobs that provide economic boosts, and enrolling larger percentages of Pell recipients.

The 2023 edition of the Economic Mobility Index also introduced tiers instead of numerical rankings, further eschewing traditional rankings. Keeping with this tradition, our 2024 EMI scored each institution's success at providing economic mobility for its low-income students and then grouped them into five quintile tiers. Tier 1 houses the schools that are doing an exceptional job of providing economic benefits to students who need them the most. For 2024, 40% of institutions (107) in Tier 1 on our EMI were in California, New York, or Texas.

The pressure is only increasing for institutions of higher education to prove their value, and state higher education officials are heavily focused on aligning programs to address economic and workforce needs while also ensuring colleges provide a return on investment. Institutions rated highly on the Economic Mobility Index prove that economic growth and providing a strong ROI to students can be achieved while enrolling the students who can benefit the most from higher education—and remind us that there are institutions across the country that are doing well at providing students who may not have the same resources with a good bang for their buck. The California, New York, and Texas systems have laid a blueprint for providing economic mobility to minoritized students that many states may be able to look toward as they develop their own plans on their respective campuses.