Do colleges around low income areas accept more low income students? Evidence from California State Universities

ABSTRACT

Using the data of California State Universities from 2000 to 2011, this article examines whether colleges around low income areas accept more low income students. The results show that campuses around low income areas have higher access rates of students who come from families in the bottom quintile of the income distribution. No relationship is shown for other quintiles. This indicates that public universities located in low income areas have played an important role in providing access to low income students.

KEYWORDS:

• Access rate
• low income students
• county income
• public state university
• CSU

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I20 I21

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ CSU Channel Island is the youngest of the 23 campuses. Data before 2004 are not available.

² Chetty et al. (2017) generated mobility rates, access rates and success rates for over 2000 colleges in the US by using administrative data from over 30 million college students. The data are from 2000 to 2011. This paper extracted the access rate data for 23 CSU campuses.

³ The figures of the access rates over time for all the CSU campuses are available upon request.