Opportunity Insights

Joining me today is Dana Pickley, managing director of News Is Out at the local media association and project manager of the Economic Opportunity Lab.

Dana helped lead this ambitious initiative connecting local newsrooms with Comcast, NBC Universal, and Harvard-based Opportunity Insights to turn their research into local journalism.

And also with us is Jared Council, Editorial Lead and Program Manager at the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Jaren, you participated in the Philadelphia portion of the lab, contributed reporting, and you brought a lot of experience working with local news organization through Lenfest, Every Voice, Every Vote initiative.

Do I have that right, Jaren? That's correct, yep.

So journalists maintained editorial control.

They chose what to cover, which made sense for their communities.

And Opportunity Insights provided the research and expertise that they could use.

But there was no requirement that they had to use the Opportunity Atlas.

The theme of the three-day event in Asheville, North Carolina, was the strength of rural places, highlighting the people, institutions, and strategies that power rural economies.

In this episode, I'm speaking with Raj Chetty, the William A. Ackman Professor of Economics at Harvard University and the Director of Opportunity Insights.

I caught up with Chetty at the conference just

before his keynote presentation on economic mobility across rural America.

And so the way I think about economic mobility is if you grow up in a family with a lower level of income, without all the resources, what are your chances of making it in life and succeeding? One simple way to measure that is if you're growing up in a low-income family, what are your odds of reaching the middle class or beyond? What's your average income in adulthood?

What are some of the characteristics that you found that really matter for economic mobility?

So the way we study this question in our research group, Opportunity Insights, is to use the tools of big data.

For example, information from anonymized tax returns and census data covering the entire U.S. population.

I think that really complicates the picture of the value of the degree.

I think one One, I would say, you know, when I think about the American dream, looking at some of the research that Raj Chetty has done with Opportunity Insights and Mayor Schaaf and I were talking about Opportunity Insights before the panel today.

I think what's, you know, really important is also to think about that.

the issue of college and the value of the degree, also in context of who does it support best and how can we make it, how can we structurally support higher education in being more affordable and also support people who are seeking degrees to be able to actually complete their degrees.

And what something that Raj Chetty and opportunity insights have found is that low income students that go into four-year degree programs and graduate from them at a certain point in their life, their earnings and the earnings gap that there would have been without obtaining a degree versus higher income peers who obtain degrees, that gap, basically shrinks and virtually doesn't exist after a certain number of years.

And so I think the important thing for us to consider is, again, I think a lot of the college and the value of the degree The arguments against the degree really – we hear often the student that goes to the Ivy League institution that is leaving $200,000 in debt.

But the typical degree seeker in California is oftentimes we have to think about the working parent that's getting a degree or – someone that's going back into school or thinking about changing their career pathways.

And then also, there's been a lot of research done.

There's a big study done by, um, an organization called Opportunity Insights.

I believe it's, it's led by a Harvard professor.

And they ran these, these, uh, very extensive studies, and they found that for, let's say, lower income folks or folks from, you know, lower income, lower socioeconomic backgrounds or whatever, the biggest factor for them, um, to be able to improve their, you know, that, that position in life is just making friends with people from, like, higher income backgrounds.