Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-2025
Keywords
Colleges, equity, geospatial analysis, higher education, mixed methods, poverty, social stratification
Abstract
Very few four-year American colleges and universities consistently enroll and graduate substantial proportions of low-income students. The outlier institutions that do-institutions I term Equity Engines-are vital social resources for both low-income students and our democratic society. Yet like other valuable resources, they are unevenly distributed across the United States. Drawing on geospatial analysis and bivariate mapping, I examine the relationship between access to and need for Equity Engines across states and within them. Moving from the state to the census tract level, I find compounding geographic barriers to bachelor's degree completion in southern states. These states have high rates of youth poverty and no or minimal access to colleges and universities that are consistently accessible to and effective at serving low-income students. In contrast, states that are effectively meeting high need with high access have multiple public Equity Engines, a worthy and feasible goal for all states.
Citation
Bassett, B. S. (2025). Where There Is No Equity Engine: Unequal Geographies of College Success for Low-Income Students. AERA Open, 11.
Comments
Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use,reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and OpenAccess pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).