Economic Mobility Depends on Institutions That Make Opportunity Usable

Economic mobility is often described as an individual achievement: work hard, earn a degree, save prudently, start a business, and advance. Ida Rademacher, Joshua Wyner, and Pilar O'Leary describe a more demanding standard. Opportunity is not meaningful if the systems governing education, finance, capital, and institutional leadership leave people without the stability or access needed to use it.

Rademacher frames financial stability as a precondition for consequential choices. A person cannot reliably pursue college, recover from a job loss, buy a home, or plan for retirement while managing continual financial shocks. Her formulation is deliberately practical: it is hard to take a big swing, she says, “if you’re standing in a canoe.” People need enough stability and predictability to take a meaningful risk or make a long-term decision.

That condition connects financial security to higher education and to the distribution of economic opportunity across communities. Wyner describes sharp differences in college outcomes by family economic position and institutional resources. Rademacher suggests that financial constraints and the resulting lack of bandwidth are likely among the pressures shaping those differences, alongside other factors. And the economic contribution of Hispanic communities described by O’Leary does not automatically translate into proportional access to capital, corporate leadership, or durable business opportunity.

Rademacher says Aspen’s work begins with the premise that every person has ambitions for their own life. The harder question is how institutions can be organized so that those ambitions are not defeated by precarity, low-value credentials, exclusion from investment, or systems designed around the needs of people who are already secure.

The Financial Security Program began with long-term asset building. Its early framing, Ida Rademacher says, was “Save, Invest, Own,” and retirement access was a central problem. She cites a persistent figure: 57 million Americans do not have access to workplace retirement savings. In Rademacher’s view, the United States has created deep capital markets and savings vehicles while leaving almost half the workforce outside workplace-based retirement provision.

When Rademacher was recruited to build the initiative into a full program 11 years ago, the task became broader: connect long-term wealth creation to the financial fragility shaping households’ present-day decisions. Retirement savings remain important, but assets intended for later life do not resolve an immediate shortfall in cash, debt, housing, benefits access, or volatile income.

The program moved from a single challenge to a wider portfolio of financial conditions: income volatility, consumer debt, affordable housing, retirement savings, and the future of wealth. It also works on financial resilience after shocks and on the public-benefits systems that can matter when earnings fall, including unemployment insurance and SNAP.

For Rademacher, the practical measure is whether a household has routinely positive cash flow and enough flexibility to navigate ordinary life. That cannot be reduced to wages alone. Usable cash may come from earnings, public benefits, or other sources; the question is whether the total is enough to meet obligations and make choices. Financial circumstances can also shape health. In some settings, she says, cash is among the leading prescriptions because a household’s financial situation strongly affects its ability to obtain care and manage basic needs.

The same constraint reaches education. Whether someone even considers college may depend on their sense of whether it can be financed. Financial security is not merely adjacent to educational attainment; it can determine whether a person is able to take on the risks of education, training, relocation, or a career change.

Rademacher’s objection to financial literacy as the presumed solution is not a dismissal of education. People may want more financial knowledge, she says, and education has a role. But households living month to month are often already accounting for every dollar. The mistake is to interpret financial strain as irresponsibility or ignorance rather than recognizing that many people are operating with almost no margin for error.

She points to the household response to cash support made available during Covid. Unlike the financial crisis, she says, the policy response included a temporary effort to put cash in households’ hands when consumption fell abruptly, jobs were lost, and businesses shut down. In the broad data she describes, households paid down debt, increased savings, invested in their children, and obtained health care they had needed.

Greater slack permits different decisions than a system that treats people principally as objects of instruction or control. Rademacher’s alternative is to focus on outcomes: design financial products, benefit systems, and market practices so people can recover from shocks while building toward wealth.

Her longer-term test is not whether the country offers a larger menu of financial products. It is whether private-sector incentives and policy parameters are aligned with household flourishing. That applies to education finance, retirement, homeownership, and other major financial decisions. A system should be judged by whether it works for households that are financially fragile, not only for those who already have stability.

For Joshua Wyner, higher education’s central failure begins with its definition of success. The College Excellence Program was founded around an apparently straightforward aim—improve student outcomes—but Wyner argues that higher education had defined outcomes too narrowly. Graduation rates and student debt were dominant measures, even though neither captures what students or society are ultimately seeking.

Students do not enroll in college in order to carry a minimum amount of debt or simply to finish a credential, Wyner says. They enroll in pursuit of a better life: work that can support a family, learning that enables them to flourish, and a credential with real value in the next stage of life.

The program’s definition of an outcome is therefore whether students learn and complete credentials that have value after college. That shifts attention from completion alone to the relationship among learning, credentials, and economic opportunity. Wyner sees higher education moving increasingly toward the language of value, though he does not claim that shift is solely the program’s work.

The measurement problem is inseparable from the structure of the sector. Wyner puts the number of U.S. colleges at roughly 4,000, depending on how they are counted. Institutions operate with substantial autonomy, while faculty often have broad discretion over what and how they teach. Compared with K–12 education, hospitals, or public-health systems, he says, higher education has few comparable quality controls in instructional content or method.

That fragmentation limits a command-and-control approach to reform. Public funding largely flows through students, who choose where to attend college. State and federal policy matter, but they do not directly control the vast number of independent institutions. A theory of change, Wyner argues, has to fit that reality.

The College Excellence Program’s approach has four parts. First, identify institutions that achieve the strongest outcomes, controlling as much as possible for differences in student populations and examining results both in college and after graduation. Second, turn their practices into frameworks, self-assessments, data reports, and other tools that colleges can use. Third, provide professional development and technical assistance to leaders and institutional teams. Fourth, elevate institutions that have demonstrated results.

Wyner is particularly insistent on the distinction between demonstrated performance and persuasive rhetoric. Organizations should not celebrate colleges simply because their leaders speak well about reform or occupy a prominent place in the field. Colleges that “walk the walk,” rather than merely describe the right aspirations, should be the examples others study.

This emphasis on value does not mean treating broad academic programs as disposable. Wyner explicitly includes history, English, and the arts. His argument is that institutions should strengthen those programs by ensuring students acquire additional capabilities that allow their education to translate into viable work. For art students, he offers examples: knowing how to teach, sell their work, manage programs, or understand business administration. The question is not whether every student should follow the same vocational path. It is whether every degree prepares students for an economic future rather than leaving that outcome to chance.

The distribution of institutional resources makes that question more urgent. Wyner describes research from his time at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, “The Achievement Trap,” which compared high-achieving students from the top and bottom halves of the income distribution.

Among high-achieving students from the bottom economic half who attended highly selective colleges, Wyner says, outcomes matched those of high-achieving students from the top economic half. But as institutional selectivity declined, the results diverged. Students from the top economic half continued to graduate at rates above 80%, while the graduation rate for students from the bottom economic half fell to 57% at nonselective schools.

For Wyner, that finding challenges the suggestion that students from less affluent families lack the talent to succeed at selective colleges. He also references research by Caroline Hoxby and others indicating that highly talented students from low-income backgrounds graduate from high schools and community colleges every year. They can perform as well as, or better than, more affluent peers, he says, yet many are not admitted to institutions with the greatest resources because they cannot pay.

Wealthy colleges and universities should take their fair share of Pell students and low-income students, Wyner argues. He calls it “shameful” that institutions with the most money often enroll the fewest low-income students. Preparation gaps may be real, he acknowledges, but they do not erase institutions’ responsibility to identify and enroll talented students who lack resources.

Nor does he see the challenge as simple public rejection of higher education. Dual enrollment—high-school students taking college classes—has grown substantially and is now larger than Advanced Placement, he says. He adds that 25% of community-college enrollment consists of high-school students in dual-enrollment programs. Families and young people have not abandoned higher education in this account; they are questioning whether it delivers enough value.

The required response is more than a revised value proposition. Every institution should examine not only how many students graduate but how graduates fare afterward, then redesign programs accordingly. Wyner’s test for progress is whether college presidents and governing boards come to regard economic mobility and talent development, rather than enrollment stability, fiscal health, or graduation rates alone, as core institutional responsibilities.

Aspen Conexión began in 2015 as Aspen Latinos and Society, when the Latino population had surpassed 56 million and was contributing more than $2 trillion to the economy. Its purpose, Pilar O'Leary says, was to elevate public understanding of a growing community and its influence, with economic mobility as its central lane.

O’Leary says the scale has changed quickly. The Latino population has now surpassed 68 million and contributes $4.1 trillion to GDP—an economic contribution she characterizes as large enough, on its own, to be the world’s fifth-largest economy.

Economic contribution, however, is not the same as economic power. O’Leary identifies continuing gaps in access to capital and leadership pathways. Closing those gaps, in her account, is a shared-prosperity strategy rather than a narrow constituency concern: companies, communities, and the broader economy all stand to benefit when they work with Latino leaders, organizations, and entrepreneurs.

The relevant decisions are made through investment choices, hiring practices, board representation, procurement systems, and partnership strategies. O’Leary wants institutions to treat Hispanic leadership and cultural knowledge as material business assets rather than peripheral considerations. Her own experience working on minority homeownership and workforce participation at Fannie Mae, followed by Latin America-focused social-impact work, reinforced her view that the strongest initiatives join private-sector participation to social goals rather than placing the two in separate camps.

The phrase has implications beyond representation or consumer marketing. O’Leary invokes the cultural prominence of Bad Bunny and the NFL’s attention toward Mexico and Madrid to make a broader point: major institutions are responding to a country and marketplace whose future is increasingly global. The question for businesses is whether they merely recognize that shift or build partnerships and leadership structures capable of acting on it.

Aspen Conexión uses three levers: leadership work, dialogue, and research. Its research is meant to move companies and other institutions from awareness to action. For the past five years, entering a sixth, the program has held an Advancing Economic Mobility Summit with McKinsey and produced reports intended to quantify Latino economic influence.

One recent report examined Latinos in the U.S. sports economy. O’Leary says the sector is expected to grow to $300 billion over the next decade and that Latino fans will account for one-third of that growth. The finding is meant to show companies that the opportunity extends beyond a single high-profile performer, league, or event. Evidence of that scale should inform investment decisions, hiring practices, market strategy, and partnerships with Latino-owned and Latino-serving organizations.

O’Leary points to procurement programs as one mechanism through which awareness can become material opportunity. She also cites incubators and a January convening that connected the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Her example was intended to show how connections among business institutions can help companies see the value of working with organizations that understand Hispanic communities.

Success would be visible in more capital for Latino entrepreneurs, more Hispanic leaders on American boards, more procurement and business partnerships, and stronger connections among communities across the Americas. Aspen Conexión works in places including Miami, Kansas City, El Paso, and Newark, while O’Leary also emphasizes relationships across Aspen’s work in Colombia, Mexico, and Spain. Demographic and cultural influence become economically consequential only when institutions create pathways to ownership, authority, and investment.

The three accounts reject measures that stop at provision. A retirement product is not enough if a household cannot withstand the emergency before retirement. A college degree is not enough if it does not lead to useful opportunity after graduation. Recognition of a community’s economic importance is not enough if capital, board seats, procurement, and business partnerships remain inaccessible.

Their proposed accountability measures are correspondingly concrete. Financial systems should leave households more resilient and able to build wealth. Colleges should produce learning and credentials that matter in the next stage of students’ lives. Companies and other institutions should be able to point to changed allocations of investment, authority, and partnership.

That standard shifts attention from individual advice to institutional design. Rademacher’s account asks whether people have the stability to act. Wyner’s asks whether institutions deliver educational value to people from all backgrounds. O’Leary’s asks whether businesses and communities turn economic and cultural recognition into participation and ownership. In each case, mobility becomes usable only when the systems that shape choice accept responsibility for its results.