Social Mobility In College Education

Given the title of the Great Equalizer, the education system is expected to close the economic gap. The system is shaped by the very things it is expected to fix; both educational and economic inequalities. Yet when we look at our society, we see that an economic gap persists, leading scholars to questions whether education is undermining equality or facilitating it. In order to explore education as the Great Equalizer, aspects of social mobility, educational resources, and college must first be understood. Social mobility is one’s ability to move between social and economic statuses, and “high levels of inequality are positively correlated with reductions in social mobility.” (Greenstone, Looney, Patashnik & Yu, 2013, p. 5). The United States is supposed to be a land of opportunity, yet when placed on a graph exploring levels of inequality and social mobility in a group of countries, the U.S. places in the middle. The graph measures social mobility by how much a child’s income is independent of their parents’ income, and measures inequality with the Gini coefficient which determines how much income goes to the …show more content…
Before even attending college, students must go through the process of applying. And due to the lack of resources including counseling, many low-income students who achieve top grades and test scores are not applying to and attending these colleges. Among groups of high achieving students, less than 8% of low-income students follow the recommended strategy of applying to a range of colleges, and 53% of these students do not apply at all (Leonhardt, 2013). These students face a disadvantage of not only having no proper understanding of the application process but also lacking exposure to these colleges because they do not know graduates or peers from these colleges (Perez-Pena,