Baruch College, an Upward-Mobility Machine

City College of New York often serves as a nostalgic symbol of American higher education’s past. The college did not charge tuition for decades, and its students, many of them poor, went on to become Nobel laureates, chief executives, civil rights leaders and more. By contrast, higher education today can seem both less accessible and less rigorous.

But it turns out that the school that occupies City College’s original 19th-century campus, on the East Side of Manhattan, has done a fine job of living up to its predecessor’s legacy.

That school is Baruch College, and it is an upward-mobility machine.

More than 60 percent of Baruch students receive Pell grants, which means they typically come from the bottom half of the income distribution. About 75 percent of undergraduates are people of color. The average annual cost of attending Baruch for low-income students is less than $2,000. And Baruch’s six-year graduation rate is 74 percent, well above the national average.

When I asked S. David Wu, an engineering scholar who is Baruch’s president, about City College’s original vision of educating the masses, he told me, “In many ways, Baruch is realizing that vision, but in a 21st-century way.”

In today’s newsletter, I’ll tell you about a new report that tracks how other colleges are doing.

A worrisome decline

After Michael Bloomberg finished being mayor of New York City in 2013, he turned his attention to philanthropy and decided that increasing economic diversity in higher education was a priority. “America needs to have as big a pool of talented, hard-working, well-educated people as it can possibly get,” Bloomberg told me.