When Disadvantaged Students Overlook Elite Colleges
Every year, scores of gifted students have their college prospects hampered by life circumstances. Imagine a teenager attending a high school where few of his peers make it to graduation, much less college. This student, however, is a high achiever. His grade-point average and test scores show it. In fact, they’re good enough to get into some of the best institutions in the country. But he doesn’t go to any of those institutions—let alone apply for them. Actual high-schoolers like this hypothetical student and the issues they face are very real.
The phenomenon—in which students do not attend the most selective colleges their qualifications suggest they could—is called “undermatching.” Few theories have garnered as much attention from the higher-education crowd as quickly as undermatching has. As Matthew Chingos, a policy expert at the Urban Institute, puts it, perhaps the chief problem with undermatching is that it disproportionately happens to low-income and minority students. A range of benefits comes with attending an elite institution: name recognition, more financial resources, and oftentimes an alumni network connected to powerful places. And by undermatching, capable students with unique perspectives on the world might miss out on those advantages—exacerbating a trend in which affluent students dominate the pipeline of those positioned for leadership roles.
A recent paper illustrates the extent to which undermatching dims the prospects of already-disadvantaged students: Those who undermatch—who are predominantly low-income and students of color—are less likely to graduate within four years, as well as within six years, than their peers who did not. Chungseo Kang and Darlene Garcia Torres, both education-policy scholars at State University of New York at Buffalo, used longitudinal U.S. Education Department data to create a national sample of nearly 5,000 students who enrolled in four-year institutions within a year of high-school graduation.
The researchers found that undermatching was highest among black students, at 49 percent. And the phenomenon seemed to have the most acute effect on Hispanic students: After controlling for various characteristics, the six-year graduation rate for those who undermatched was 28 percentage points lower than it was for those who didn’t.