The Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at The City College of New York is pleased to launch Social Mobility Lab, an initiative to support scholarship, convenings, and public events about social mobility and higher education. The Lab aims to advance understanding of how higher education in the United States expands and accelerates opportunities for students and the families and communities from which they come. This mobility can be defined not just by wealth, income, and economic measures, but also by measures of quality of life, increased security and freedom, and opportunities for people to live the lives they desire.

Why launch this lab at CUNY? Study after study suggests that CUNY is among the most effective engines of social mobility in the United States. According to The New York Times, CUNY has “propelled almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all eight Ivy League campuses, plus Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and Chicago, combined.” Our success is clear. But we know far less than we should about how we do it and the methods and resources required to scale and replicate our success across higher education in the United States. In fact, many questions about how social mobility works and its connections to higher education remain unanswered.

To that end, we share this call for proposals to CUNY faculty and doctoral students interested in exploring questions related to social mobility and higher education in the United States. Among the empirical questions that are of interest:

• How should we define social mobility and understand its success? What do different disciplines, approaches, and measures offer to help us understand the transformative effects of higher education in social mobility?
• What are the particular ways that higher education intervenes to support increased social mobility or other positive life outcomes?
• How is mobility affected by differences in culture, race, gender identity, immigrant-status, and other variables?
• What differentiates the success in social mobility at CUNY versus other universities that are also successful?

Alongside these and many other empirical questions, the Lab is interested in conceptual and theoretical questions related to social mobility and higher education. We welcome proposals from scholars in any discipline, and the Social Mobility Lab intends to support work from across the disciplines, as well as work that is designed to be interdisciplinary. We are interested in basic and applied research. We have an interest in research that might be focused on—or have direct bearing on—CUNY and on projects about social mobility and higher education that have a broader or different scope.

All full-time faculty and doctoral students at CUNY are eligible to apply. The inaugural cycle of grants will support six (6) projects. Each project will be supported with up to $10,000.

In order to apply, please submit at this portal:

1. Your CV. Applications can come from individuals or teams of researchers; if the latter, please include CVs for the PI and co-PIs.
2. Project description, not to exceed four pages in 12-point font, either single or double-spaced. Please address the project’s questions, methodologies, relevance, and potential impact. Please signal the kind(s) of research products likely to come from the work (e.g., articles, books). Also, please position the project in relation to your other work and your overall ambitions as a scholar.
3. Budget and timeline, to understand the types of support needed for the project and the expected timeline for research and completion. Grants cannot be used for course releases; otherwise, the same budget rules that apply to PSC-CUNY Research Awards apply to this grants program.
4.  If the project requires IRB approval, please make clear in your application whether you have already applied for or received IRB approval.

The deadline for applications is Monday, May 6, 2024. Applications will be reviewed by an interdisciplinary faculty committee, and awards will be announced in early June 2024. The grant period is July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025; grant recipients will be permitted to request an extension on use of funds of up to one year.

Recipients of Social Mobility Lab grants will be expected to participate in the activities of the Social Mobility and to present their works-in-progress as part of a brown-bag series at CCNY during the 2024-25 academic year. If you have questions, please reach out to Daniel Hila, the Lab’s Program Manager, at dhila@ccny.cuny.edu.