[antasvara]

Which measure are you going off there? Because I see the "Chance a poor student has to become a rich adult" metric at 41% for UC Riverside and 58% for Harvard.

There is the "overall mobility" metric that favors UC Riverside, but the way that's being measured would seem to skew in favor of whichever college has students in lower quintiles (a top quintile kid can't move up 2 quintiles).

[rafram]

Ah, you're right, I misread. But 41% vs 58% isn't a big enough difference to pay "any amount" for IMO - and the gap is much smaller with other public universities like Irvine (55%) and SUNY Binghampton (54%).

[lumost]

Quintiles is a poor measure given the extremes of inequality. The Pareto distribution of income and wealth has folks in the top 10/1/.1/.01 percentiles with vastly different lifestyles compared to the other percentiles.

[rafram]

Sure, but an individual income in the top 20% ($130,000) is enough to be comfortable pretty much anywhere in the US.

[Tadpole9181]

"Any amount of money" when the statistics are still a coin toss sounds like a gambling addict. That's insanely bad odds for "life savings" amounts of money...