The Mobility Center
Understanding Mobility Early Enough to Act
For generations, America has operated on a promise: Earn a degree, get a good job, and economic security would follow. But reaching those milestones is not the same as building a meaningful career and thriving life. Careers no longer follow a predictable arc, so a milestone that once signaled a promising future may tell us less and less about what comes next.
The Mobility Center is a new initiative that will identify leading indicators of mobility, test long-held assumptions about what works, and build the shared evidence base needed to put young people on a path to mobility.
The Need for Earlier Signals
Today, the field measures mobility only with lagging indicators, like earnings at age 30 or after a decade-long career progression, long after the decisions that shaped those outcomes were made. The Center develops leading indicators that can be read while young people are still in school, checked against what happens next: persistence, early employment, advancement, and the ability to recover from a job loss.
Early signals can move a field: when research showed that children not reading proficiently by the end of third grade were four times as likely not to graduate on time, it helped spark a national movement on early literacy. Chicago’s ninth-grade “on-track” measure gives schools a similar signal they can act on in time. The Center aims to carry that principle from school into work.
Guiding Questions
The Center will focus on what we can see and change early enough to make a lasting difference in young people’s lives.
What do young people need to thrive?
Which conditions and experiences build the knowledge, capabilities, relationships, and agency to create good lives?
How do we make those opportunities available at scale?
How can more young people reach strong schools, meaningful pathways, valuable credentials, and work that offers a future?
What turns opportunity into mobility?
Why do young people who reach similar milestones experience such different outcomes, and what can change their trajectories?
How We Work
The Center will bridge the gap between empirical research and real-world action by offering practical, field-ready recommendations and frameworks that policymakers and practitioners can adopt and scale. Its work will:
- Build and share the evidence, tools, and partnerships needed to define the conditions young people need to thrive
- Widen young people’s access to opportunity at scale
- Make sure that opportunity leads to real economic mobility
The goal is not simply to understand mobility better.
It’s to help the field act sooner.
Connected to a Larger Goal: 50 Million Futures by 2035
The Mobility Center serves as the engine behind TNTP’s goal of putting 50 million young people on a measurable path to mobility by 2035.
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