Birthday Wish: Equal Opportunity

Today, Accelerating Achievement turns one. This week, we’re looking back at some of the year’s highlights and thinking about where the next year will take us.

There’s a lot going on in the DEI network of colleges, states, and partners. All year, we’ve been highlighting learnings from our exchanges of information and ideas in DEI Dispatches. Our What’s Up with DEI series featured the work of all fifteen colleges and six states; one week last May, we brought you daily posts from a few practitioners who work at the intersection of equity and postsecondary completion. We kicked off that week with The Ladder of Educational Opportunity, which reminded us that supporting programmatic and policy innovations can help ensure developmental education programs accomplish what they are intended to do: help students, regardless of background and level of preparation, obtain a credential or degree and put them on the path to economic stability.

As Americans, we pride ourselves on being members of a society where equal opportunity offers everyone a chance at success. But mounting evidence suggests that children born into low-income families are not likely to ever improve their economic security. In a speech last Thursday, Alan Krueger, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, illustrated the lack of social mobility in America:

Studies find that your parent’s income is a good predictor of your subsequent income. Studies that use income data averaged over longer periods of time for parents and children tend to find higher correlations between parental and children’s income. A reasonable summary is that the correlation between parents’ and their children’s income is around 0.50. This is remarkably similar to the correlation that Sir Francis Galton found between parents’ height and their children’s height over 100 years ago. This fact helps to put in context what a correlation of 0.50 implies. The chance of a person who was born to a family in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution rising to the top 10 percent as an adult is about the same as the chance that a dad who is 5’6” tall having a son who grows up to be over 6’1” tall. It happens, but not often.

Why is it that so few low-income young people are able to advance in America? The readers of this blog know from experience that our education system, the keystone of our society’s meritocracy, has fallen on hard times. The pipeline that carries students from childhood to postsecondary education and living-wage work is leaky, damaged, and archaic. A postsecondary credential is now more vital than ever for finding work, but the majority of students who enroll at community colleges are not prepared for college-level courses. Too many students who need developmental education never progress on to a credential. Dev ed practitioners and policy-makers know that as long as our dev ed programs allow so many students to stagnate, social mobility will remain low. Promising innovations all around the country are getting more students quickly through these programs and on to credit-bearing courses, but they need to be expanded and replicated. Transforming dev ed from a barrier and a burden for underprepared students to a stepping stone toward achievement will restore a crucial rung on the ladder of opportunity.