In 2025, the American Council on Education (ACE) will launch the new Carnegie Social and Economic Mobility classification. According to ACE, “the Social and Economic Mobility Classification will identify institutions throughout the U.S. higher education landscape that provide strong socio-economic mobility for students, and it will equip users to understand how an institution’s data compares to similar campuses.”

The classification will provide a valuable assessment of the mobility performance of institutions, clarifying which institutions are succeeding and which have more work to do. Public Agenda’s research complements this assessment by identifying how institutions that perform strongly on existing measures of economic mobility are achieving positive outcomes for low-income students. Learn more about our methodology.

The good news? Transformation is possible. In our study of six universities, we engaged with a diverse range of institutions–some more than 100 years old, some less than 30, some located in the heart of a city, and some offering the only educational opportunities within sixty miles. In none of these cases was success inevitable. Strong economic mobility outcomes emerge from choices, policies, and practices made by specific people grounded in shared values. Institutions are achieving impact because they prioritize the success of low-income students and build a culture around that purpose. 

We heard this living commitment in conversations about resource allocation, program development, and all sorts of decisions from major policies such as tuition and fee structures to apparently minor questions such as the physical layout of advising offices.

In interviews and focus groups, faculty and staff articulated the challenges facing low-income and first generation students and the solutions the university brought to help students meet those challenges. In many cases, those solutions were initially proposed by student-facing faculty and staff and embraced by senior leaders. When everyone is clear about what they are there to accomplish and something is making it harder, it’s possible (though not always easy) to build consensus and take action.

This capacity for action showed up in stories of changes to recruitment approaches; decisions about admissions policies; and strategies for financial aid modeling, retention investments, and course sequencing. Clarity of purpose enables everyone to focus on shared goals rather than competing interests. The “all in” commitment to low-income student success is what makes the institutions in our case studies so nimble–they identify challenges and make adjustments quickly, enabling them to lead the way on economic mobility indicators. 

Context matters. Effectively engaging low-income and first-generation students depends on understanding where they are coming from and then building pathways from those starting points toward and through higher education and into individual and community wealth-building. The institutions we studied recognized their students as integral parts of communities with distinctive histories–in large part because many of the faculty and staff come from those same communities. These universities meet students and their families where they are and help them see how higher education can play a greater role in their future than it has in their past.

This resource includes individual case studies, a discussion of common themes emerging from our research, and questions for institutions to consider. We envision this resource as a learning tool for individuals who hope to spark change in their institutions and for groups of colleagues within institutions working together to make their colleges and universities more effective agents of mobility. We also see value for groups of colleagues across institutions in similar roles who would like to think together about how their job function can be part of the economic mobility solution for their institution.