Catalyzing social mobility through student success

We investigate the role of South African higher education institutions in promoting intergenerational social mobility using a newly linked administrative dataset of university students and secondary school completers. We measure mobility as the share of graduates from lower-income secondary schools—proxied by South Africa's quintile classification of school poverty—who are estimated to enter top-earning positions. Although access to higher education has expanded for students from lower-quintile schools, large differences in mobility outcomes persist across institutions and fields of study. For example, mobility rates range from 1% to 26% across institutions. In the 2022 cohort, we estimate that 15,260 graduates—about 11% of the cohort—are projected to be upwardly mobile. To assess the sources of these differences, we simulate a reallocation of graduates across institutions. When sorting constraints are relaxed, mobility rates converge but do not equalize, indicating that differences in graduation rates and qualification composition remain important drivers of institutional mobility outcomes.