In 2018, in collaboration with Opportunity Insights, the Census Bureau constructed and released the Opportunity Atlas, a comprehensive Census tract-level dataset of children’s outcomes in adulthood using data covering nearly the entire U.S. population. For each tract, we estimated children’s outcomes in adulthood such as earnings distributions and incarceration rates by parental income, race/ethnicity, and sex. These estimates allow the public to trace the roots of outcomes such as poverty and incarceration to the neighborhoods in which children grew up. The statistics in the Opportunity Atlas focused on adult outcomes of children born in between 1978-1983 at the tract level. This original data release is now called “Module 1: Neighborhood Mobility Outcomes.” The original release of the Opportunity Atlas was accompanied by a research paper entitled “The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility.”
In 2024, we capitalized on an additional decade of data to not only support the public, scholars, and policy makers in understanding where and for whom opportunity exists, but also how it is changing over time and within places. We provided publicly available data on changes in mobility by county, birth cohort (1978-1992), race, class (parental income), and sex, as well as an interactive module within the Opportunity Atlas called “Module 2: County & Metro Mobility Trends,” that allows users to explore mobility trends in counties. The statistics documenting county mobility trends is accompanied by a research paper entitled, “Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility.”
In 2025, we released new mobility outcomes about credit within Module 1 of the Opportunity Atlas. Focusing on the population born 1978–1985 and the counties these individuals grew up in, we estimate various outcomes in 2020 by race and parental income, such as credit scores, delinquency rates, credit card balances, and mortgage and student loan balances. These statistics allow the public to explore how access to credit varies widely across geography, race, and class (parental income). The new statistics accompany the research paper entitled, “Credit Access in the United States."
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Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility
Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility
Credit Access in the United States