Should More Low-Income Students Apply to Highly Selective Colleges?

“Access to the nation’s most selective colleges remains starkly unequal, with students in the lowest income quartile constituting less than 4% of enrollment,” say Michael Bastedo and Allyson Flaster (University of Michigan/Ann Arbor) in this article in Educational Researcher. “Students in the top SES quartile comprise 69% of enrollment at institutions that admit fewer than a third of their applicants…” 

One increasingly popular explanation for this enrollment gap is undermatching – academically able low-income students not applying to selective colleges for which they are qualified, settling instead for lower-tier institutions. Bastedo and Flaster are skeptical about this theory for three reasons 

First, they don’t believe there is good evidence about the life benefits of attending different tiers of college, and most measures of college “quality” are quite unscientific. Life advantages might accrue at the extremes – going to a highly selective college versus a low-quality community college – but the evidence about the whole middle range is “quite muddy,” say Bastedo and Flaster. Among the factors that need to be looked at more carefully are a college’s graduation rate, students’ debt burden, placement in graduate or professional schools, and post-graduate earnings.

Second, the authors question whether it’s possible for researchers to predict which low-income students will get into selective colleges to which they haven’t yet applied. Competition for seats in these colleges has become much more intense in recent years, and extra-curricular activities, alumni parents, athletic prowess, and other intangibles play an increasingly important part. In many of these areas, higher-SES students have great advantages.

Third, even if we look only at SAT scores and GPAs, high-achieving disadvantaged students are still not as competitive as the undermatching advocates contend. “Although low-SES students have made remarkable improvements in academic performance over the past several decades,” say Bastedo and Flaster, “– earning higher GPAs and taking more challenging coursework – high-SES students have improved their performance even more dramatically. Once you closely examine high-school coursework patterns, relatively few low-SES students have the qualifications required for admittance to the nation’s most selective colleges.”

“Thus,” the authors conclude, “in a counterfactual world in which there is perfect concordance between all students’ educational achievement measures and the selectivity of college they attend, higher education stratification would remain the same. And the evidence that improving match would improve educational outcomes, such as student learning, is weak. Although their numbers are likely overstated, there are undoubtedly outstanding low-income students who could earn admission to elite colleges if encouraged to apply, and for those students, the effects of their choices of college and life outcomes could be substantial. This does not change the fact, however, that college application interventions are not a panacea, and stronger interventions at the institutional level are needed to effect real change – in the resources provided by colleges to support low-income students, in enrollment practices, or in the ways students are admitted to selective colleges. Anything less will fail to reduce postsecondary inequality at a systemic level.” [In addition, of course, better preparation in K-12 schooling is essential.  K.M.]

“Conceptual and Methodological Problems in Research on College Undermatch” by Michael Bastedo and Allyson Flaster in Educational Researcher, March 2014 (Vol. 43 #2, p 93-99), 

http://edr.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/02/06/0013189X14523039?pa...; the authors can be reached at bastedo@umich.edu and aflaster@umich.edu. 

From the Marshall Memo #529