California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) has been ranked 4th among all California colleges and 18th nationally out of 2,137 colleges in the “Overall Mobility Index” of students category in a comprehensive report released Jan. 18 by The Equity of Opportunity Project.
This category reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CSUDH would move up two or more “income quintiles.” The university was also ranked 8th out of 369 “selective public colleges” nationally in the category, and 2nd in the 23-campus California State University (CSU) system behind CSU Los Angeles.
The report and all its categories were made easily searchable online by the New York Times. The report was also featured by Times columnist David Leonhardt in his piece “America’s Great Working-Class Colleges.”
“This New York Times article is a welcome validation for the great work all of you [CSUDH campus community] are involved in every day,” said university President Willie J. Hagan, who quoted the column. “You should all be very proud to count yourselves among the ‘deeply impressive institutions that continue to push many Americans into the middle class and beyond–many more, in fact, than elite colleges that receive far more attention.’”
The mobility rates were defined as the percentage of its students who come from a family in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, and end up in the top fifth of the income distribution. The report found that some universities, such as CSUDH, with a much larger percentage of students from low-income families, have very high mobility rates, and high earnings outcomes that are closely comparable to students at highly selective colleges.
The Equity of Opportunity Project’s findings were derived from 30 million college students. The data was compiled from statistics on students’ earnings and their parents’ incomes for each college in the United States.
