Call for Proposals Grants for CUNY Faculty and Doctoral Students Research on Social Mobility and Higher Education in the United States
The Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at The City College of New York is pleased to launch Social Mobility Lab, an initiative to support scholarship, convenings, and public events about social mobility and higher education. The Lab aims to advance understanding of how higher education in the United States expands and accelerates opportunities for students and the families and communities from which they come. This mobility can be defined not just by wealth, income, and economic measures, but also by measures of quality of life, increased security and freedom, and opportunities for people to live the lives they desire. Why launch this lab at CUNY? Study after study suggests that CUNY is among the most effective engines of social mobility in the United States. According to The New York Times, CUNY has “propelled almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all eight Ivy League campuses, plus Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and Chicago, combined.” Our success is clear. But we know far less than we should about how we do it and the methods and resources required to scale and replicate our success across higher education in the United States. In fact, many questions about how social mobility works and its connections to higher education remain unanswered. To that end, we share this call for proposals to CUNY faculty and doctoral students interested in exploring questions related to social mobility and higher education in the United States. Among the empirical questions that are of interest: ● How should we define social mobility and understand its success? What do different disciplines, approaches, and measures offer to help us understand the transformative effects of higher education in social mobility? ● What are the particular ways that higher education intervenes to support increased social mobility or other positive life outcomes? ● How is mobility affected by differences in culture, race, gender identity, immigrant-status, and other variables? ● What differentiates the success in social mobility at CUNY versus other universities that are also successful?