March 1, 2017

If You’re Poor, Here are the Best Universities To Go To

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Over at the Equality of Opportunity Project, a group of scholars has ranked every college and university in the country on a measure of how good they are at producing income mobility. For each school, this is defined at the percentage of students who are in the bottom income quintile multiplied by the percentage who end up in the top quintile. For example:

CSU Los Angeles
33.1% of students are in the bottom quintile
29.9% end up in the top quintile
Mobility rate = 9.89%

After scanning the scores, there are two big takeaways:

  • If you’re in the bottom quintile, head to Los Angeles or New York City, which absolutely dominate the top 100. The entire CUNY system is really strong, and outside the city, SUNY has a bunch of good campuses. In Los Angeles, both the CSU and the UC systems have a good selection of schools with high mobility rates. Texas isn’t bad either, and it has good schools all over the state.
  • If you want the best chance of moving into the top quintile and don’t much care about your field of study, apply to the Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology, right near beautiful La Guardia Airport in New York City. They have a spectacular mobility rate.

It’s not uncommon for the best scoring school in a state to specialize in something. Welding in Oklahoma. Seamanship in Maine. Pharmacists in Massachusetts. And technical schools all over the place. Are you curious about the top-scoring school in your state? Here they are:

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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