Raj Chetty

And then that continues into higher education.

If you go to a college that helps a lot of people rise up, gets them into good careers and not into pathways that are thriving in the current economy, that has long lasting benefits.

Why is our society so segregated?

I think there are a few different reasons.

If you look at where people live in cities in America, you tend to see that high income people live in certain neighborhoods, lower income people live in other neighborhoods.

If you look at where we go to school, where we go to college, there tend to be certain colleges in America where if you look at kids' outcomes after they graduate from college,

They do terrifically well.

Think of well-known places like Harvard or Stanford or Columbia, MIT.

But unfortunately, it turns out that very few kids from low-income families actually attend these institutions, even at present after they've expanded financial aid dramatically and so on.

There are other colleges in America, like two-year community colleges, that educate many low-income kids.

But unfortunately, when we look at outcomes after kids graduate from those colleges, they don't look so great.

Not that many of those kids are thriving afterward in terms of having successful careers and so on.

So that's another dimension of our society where there's a lot of segregation.

Lower-income kids tend to go to certain kinds of colleges.

Higher-income kids go to other colleges.

In fact, it turns out colleges are as segregated

as neighborhoods in the United States, even though you might think of colleges as being the place where you mix with others.

And so segregation is prevalent throughout our society.

And often it's the higher income people who are participating in institutions that give you opportunities to then do even better.

And that perpetuates a lack of opportunity.