Most low-income students who attend top colleges thrive. Merely going to college isn’t enough to change a teenager’s life. The benefits of college – higher income, better health, greater life satisfaction – generally depend on graduating, research shows. Which is one reason you sometimes hear worries about whether low-income students can fit in at top colleges.

But the evidence suggests that they can and do.

The median six-year graduation rate for Pell students at the colleges in our index is 84 percent, only slightly lower than the overall rate of 85 percent. College certainly involves challenges for many low-income students, but they largely meet them when they attend a top college. That’s a big reason these colleges matter: They don’t leave many students saddled with the toxic combination of debt and no degree.

On some campuses, the Pell graduation rate even exceeds the overall rate. One of them is the University of California at Irvine.

Irvine’s story is fascinating. It owes its existence to California’s population explosion after World War II, which created a quandary for the state’s public universities. Either they had to step back from their historic mission – and educate a much smaller share of California teenagers – or they had to grow enormously.

Despite the costs, a bipartisan group of state leaders chose expansion. On June 20, 1964, one day after the Civil Rights Act passed, President Lyndon B. Johnson joined state officials in a previously unincorporated patch of Orange County to dedicate the Irvine campus. The new campus’s raison d’etre, as with new ones in San Diego and Santa Cruz, was to provide a college education for the masses.

Throughout, the University of California took deliberate steps to attract students of modest means. It kept tuition low and did far more to recruit community-college transfers than most elite state universities. The transfer pipeline is crucial, because many highly qualified low-income students— unaware of how much financial aid is available at some four-year colleges — first enroll at a local community college, where published tuition tends to be low.