Research shows us that student’s prospects of earning more than their parents have fallen from 90% to 50% over the past half century; instead of increasing numbers moving up the economic ladder from generation to the next the opposite is occurring.

Anti-poverty programs are maintenance programs, relatively few move up the ladder. The feds maintain a Mobility Index, percentage of kids who move from the bottom 40% by income to the top 40%.

There is one shining light.

The public colleges have been extraordinarily successful in moving graduates up the economic ladder as measured by the Mobility Index

Raj Chetty and others at Stanford, using “big data” techniques scanned extremely large numbers of students over more than a decade and found,

To take just one encouraging statistic: At City College, in Manhattan, 76 percent of students who enrolled in the late 1990s and came from families in the bottom fifth of…