Higher education has been a dream for generations of men and women all over the world. Many people consider higher education a major step on the path towards success. Most high-paying jobs require a college or university degree. And parents often begin saving for their children’s college years when they are still young. But does higher education improve the lives of all people in the same way? People have long called college the ‘great equalizer,’ meaning it gives students from all backgrounds the same opportunities or similar chances for success. A study released in February 2017 supports this idea. The study comes from a research program called the Equality of Opportunity Project. It is operated by Stanford University and other top schools in the United States. In the study, researchers examined tax records from about 30 million U.S. college students and their families. The tax records were from the years 1999 to 2013. The researchers then compared the earnings of families before their children went to college to the income of individual students about 10 years after they completed their studies. The findings may not come as a surprise to some. For example, it showed a degree from an ‘Ivy League’ or other highly selective school helps students from low income families a great deal. Ivy League is a term for eight private universities in the northeastern United States. Many people consider them to be among the best for higher education in the world. Two of the eight, Columbia University and Cornell University, are in New York State. The others are Brown University in Rhode Island; Dartmouth College in New Hampshire; Harvard University in Massachusetts; the University of Pennsylvania; Princeton University in New Jersey; and Yale University in Connecticut. The study found that about 60 percent of the lowest income students at Ivy League schools earned as much as students from the highest income families later in life. But the high cost and intense level of competition to attend one of these schools can be a barrier for many students. What may be more interesting is what less widely known colleges can do, says Niklas Flamang. He is a doctoral degree candidate in economics at Stanford. Flamang says the study identified 10 less selective universities that also helped large numbers of students escape poverty. The State University of New York at Stony Brook is one example. Fifty-one percent of Stony Brook students from the lowest income group entered the highest income group sometime after graduating. Flamang says this proves that any given college can be a tool for success.