Opportunity Atlas shows the effect of childhood zip codes on adult success

How much does where you grow up influence your chance for social mobility and economic opportunity? Now the Opportunity Atlas, a new data tool from the U.S. Census Bureau and Harvard University’s research institute Opportunity Insights, can tell us. The Opportunity Atlas uses census and IRS data to show what kinds of average outcomes children have as adults, based on where they grew up, and how those compare to average outcomes of children who grew up elsewhere - a study of 20 million Americans from childhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s to their mid-thirties in this decade. 

The data used in the Opportunity Atlas is calculated at the census tract level and examines where children grew up, regardless of where they live in their adulthood. The mapping tool uses color shading to display an outcomes comparison in social mobility amongst children in this census tract. Users can compare individual local tracts to the national average or compare outcomes of subgroups, by race, gender or parents’ income levels. For example, users can compare average outcomes for Black female children of middle-income parents across the nation, and see which areas produced better outcomes than the nationwide average for that subgroup and in which places such children had worse outcomes.  (The story of race and racism, combined with residential segregation, is a critical part of why outcomes by census tract vary so much.) 

The ability to look at a variety of data points, including average individual and house hold income, educational attainment, employment rates and incarceration rates lets user see how qualities of different tracts contributed to different average outcomes. The Atlas also examines neighborhood traits such as poverty rate, job growth, median household income and median rent, which illustrates the connections between neighborhood conditions and children’s outcomes. 

The overall message is sobering: opportunity and social mobility still elude far too many people in far too many places. In nearly every place in the country, children whose parents were low-income tended to have poorer-than-average outcomes as adults. But it’s also important to note that the factors that inhibit mobility are within society’s control to influence – schools, violence, incarceration, housing, job access, and quality health care are some of the reasons that zip codes and census tracts matter for life outcomes. And these factors can be improved with the appropriate investment and good policy. And because the results are also an average, it’s important to remember that there’s nothing about the tool that suggests that every family’s outcome is preordained or determined. But you can use the Opportunity Atlas to document how far we have to go in this struggle, and how best to target resources to improve certain outcomes.