UTEP is the most socially mobile university in Texas

EL PASO, TX – The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) was chosen as the top campus in Texas for social mobility, according to a ranking of universities published by the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal ranks universities based on the extent to which they help lower-income students get high-paying jobs while minimizing the cost of their educations.

“We don’t usually pay much attention to college rankings because they focus on selectivity. That’s the wrong measure. We want to be measured by who we include, not who we exclude,” said UTEP President Heather Wilson.

According to the WSJ, the social mobility ranking “lists universities in order of how much they improve the social mobility of their students. It rewards universities that welcome the highest proportion of students from lower-income families, while maintaining high graduation rates and having a positive impact on graduate wages and minimizing the costs of attending college.”

Nationally, UTEP ranked 20th in the rankings, with a score of 91.6 out of a possible 100 points. The university also ranked 110th nationally out of 400 campuses that the publication scored for student experience.

As part of its efforts to keep costs down for students, UTEP announced last month that it would freeze tuition and mandatory fees for the next two years.

The WSJ is not the first to recognize UTEP’s impact on improving the trajectory of its graduates. In 2019, MarketWatch named the El Paso university as one of the top ten in the U.S. for upward mobility.