Colorado State University-Pueblo named top Colorado school for economic mobility

PUEBLO – A national company specializing in career outcomes has named Colorado State University-Pueblo as the top Colorado school for helping students move up the economic ladder. Zippia recently ranked the top schools by state in terms of which ones have the largest percentage of students who enter in a low income bracket and wind up in a much higher earning position.

The Zippia ranking aligns with the 2015 Brookings Institute report, which ranked CSU-Pueblo second among all four year institutions in the state of Colorado in terms of the value-added benefits it provides its students. The Brookings report, Beyond College Rankings: A Value-Added Approach to Assessing Two and Four-year Schools, used government and private data sources to analyze the value of colleges based on the economic success of its graduates by measuring income, occupations, and loan repayment rates.

“Giving our students upward mobility is what we do at Colorado State University-Pueblo--a point of pride for our faculty, staff, and community,” said CSU-Pueblo President Timothy Mottet.

A college education has long been tagged as the key to economic mobility. One of the critical factors considered by today’s college freshmen is whether a school will launch them into a higher economic bracket.  According to the Higher Education Research Institute’s study of 2015 freshmen, 60 percent of incoming freshmen indicated it was “very important” that a college’s alumni were “very well off financially” (www.heri.ucla.edu/briefs/TheAmericanFreshman2015-Brief.pdf).

Focusing on the economic mobility of the students in each school, Zippia ranked institutions with data from the Equality of Opportunity project, which helped plot:

• Mobility Rate — Percent of students who have parents in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution and reach the top 20 percent of the income distribution.
• Upper-Tail Mobility Rate — Percent of students who have parents in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution and reach the top 1 percent of the income distribution.

Zippia also used the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) database to determine what graduates earned six and 10 years after graduation. Community colleges and schools from our rankings that had fewer than 200 students per entering cohort, were not considered in the rankings. The full report may be found at: www.zippia.com/advice/best-colleges-economic-mobility-state/

About Zippia

Founded in 2015, Zippia gathered experts in the fields of technology, marketing, and engineering who were passionate about improving career outcomes for everyone. Zippia believes that everyone should be able to make career decisions with their eyes wide open and have built an intelligent and personalized resource for career questions.