Mismatched Students, Missed Opportunities

Theoretical frameworks on mismatch, rooted in affirmative action literature, provide divergent conclusions on how overmatch, a synonym for affirmative action, and undermatch shape degree completion outcomes for Black undergraduates at selective postsecondary institutions. Through examining data from the 2003–2009 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Survey, this study creates an academic index that estimates the precollege academic credentials of approximately 650 Black, first-time undergraduates enrolled at the top three tiers of selective colleges during the 2003–04 academic year to examine the effects of undermatching or attending a college that is less rigorous than a college that matches their precollege academic record. The findings suggest that overmatched Black students who enrolled at the most selective institutions were far more likely to graduate than students with similar precollege academic credentials who enrolled at their best academic match. The results also indicate that undermatching had an adverse effect on degree completion rates.

A More Mindful Approach to College and Career Counseling

While social and emotional learning practices are now more common in American classrooms, counselors often have limited time and resources to devote to college counseling at all, let alone a type of counseling grounded in social and emotional awareness. The American School Counselor Association recommends a student-to-counselor ratio of 250 to 1, but the current ratio is 430 to 1. Few high school counselors have the rare luxury of only needing to focus on college and career readiness. They are up against pressures from parents, and sometimes administrators, who want to see more AP courses, higher GPAs, higher ACT and SAT scores, and more elite college acceptances. These pressures can blur a counselor's view of what is actually suitable for each individual student; this means the counselor needs to understand financial fit, social and emotional fit, and academic match for each college-bound student. This kind of holistic understanding of a student is the only way to restore a focus on student wellbeing to the college and career planning process.

Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?

School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents’ choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We study relationships among parent preferences, peer quality, and causal effects on outcomes for applicants to New York City’s centralized high school assignment mechanism. We use applicants’ rank-ordered choice lists to measure preferences and to construct selection-corrected estimates of treatment effects on test scores, high school graduation, college attendance, and college quality. Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in short- and long-run student outcomes. Preferences are unrelated to school effectiveness and academic match quality after controlling for peer quality. (JEL D12, H75, I21, I26, I28)