2024 Economic Mobility Index

The Economic Mobility Index (EMI) assesses institutions on how well they serve low-income students and provide them with a return on their investment. It uses the results of our low-income PEP analysis and multiplies institutions’ comparative rank by the percentage of Pell Grant recipients that they enroll. Instead of ranking schools, our team sorts them into tiers, since we know that there is little practical difference between numbers on a ranked list.

The EMI uses data from the most recent College Scorecard release from June 2024 (which reflects institution-level data from the 2021-2022 academic year) and the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2022 five-year estimates). We first calculate each institution’s price-to-earnings premium (PEP) for low-income students. The low-income PEP shows how long it takes students from families earning $30,000 or less per year to recoup the cost of obtaining their credential based on the net price they paid and the earnings boost they received from attending. We use this formula: Total Average Net Price for Low-Income Students / (Median Earnings of Low-Income Graduates – Median Earnings of a High School Graduate in the State) = Number of Years to Recoup the Net Cost

We use $30,000 as our marker for identifying low-income students based on the data available in the College Scorecard. This figure is also the income bracket most closely representative of the income of Pell Grant recipients, the majority of whom come from families earning less than $40,000 per year. Because the College Scorecard only reports data on federally funded institutions and students, our calculations are limited to schools and students that receive federal aid. We also eliminate all institutions lacking the necessary data to calculate a PEP value from our analysis. These data include only institutions where a bachelor's degree is the predominant degree offered, so our measure of total average net price in the PEP calculation assumes four years of enrollment.

Once we establish a PEP value for each institution’s low-income students, we assign a percentile rank to identify where institutions stack up in delivering fast ROI for their low-income students. The school that gives its low-income students the highest return receives a 100% PEP percentile rank. To calculate the EMI value, we then multiply each school’s low-income student PEP percentile rank by the percentage of Pell recipients it enrolls. This calculation helps to contextualize which schools not only serve low-income students well, but also serve a large share of them in the first place, and thus are powerful drivers of upward mobility. Lastly, we assign a numerical rank, which we used to create five tiers reflective of institutions’ performance on the EMI, since we know that there is little practical difference between numbers on a ranked list. Institutions that show no ROI for low-income students are not ranked within the overall tiers for providing socioeconomic mobility. For institutions with multiple campuses that report data separately, we use only the campus location with the highest enrollment for the EMI ranking. For institutions with both online and in-person locations, we keep the online campus plus the highest-enrolled in-person location.