A Wider Lens on the ‘Match’ Between Students and Colleges

The plight of high-achieving, low-income students who “undermatch,” enrolling in less-selective colleges than their grades and test scores suggest they could, has gotten a lot of attention. At least one prominent effort is underway to provide advising and information to help such students get into and through top colleges.

Now a new book intends to expand the definition of match to include factors beyond selectivity and to extend the concept to a broader group of students. The book, “Matching Students to Opportunity,” is full of research that examines the role college and government policies play in increasing — or reducing — the match between students and the colleges where they enroll. The Chronicle spoke with Jessica S. Howell, one of the book’s editors. The conversation with Ms. Howell, executive director of policy research at the College Board, has been edited and condensed.

Q. The book seeks to broaden the discussion of college match to include more students and factors beyond academics. Why is that important?

A. Some of the people who were working in the match space early on felt like, if we can’t figure out how to fix this for the very high-achieving, low-income students, then how will we stand a chance of figuring out how to fix it for everyone else? And that’s because the high-achieving, low-income students have such strong academic credentials that they would be attractive and admissible to quite elite and selective institutions, and those are precisely the institutions that tend to have enough resources to then give them the full ride that they need in order to attend very expensive institutions.

We’re talking about students who are ready to go to college and not wind up in developmental-education classes. Those students are admissible and well-matched to a very different set of colleges, and those colleges don’t tend to have the very deep pockets that will enable them to give these students full rides. So there are very different issues, more complicated issues.

Q. Many of the efforts to improve match try to get students to apply to colleges that are a better fit for them, but the book questions whether that’s sufficient. Why?

A. There’s no reason to think that we shouldn’t be helping students make more-informed college choices by providing them with better information and fee waivers that make it cheaper to apply to a broader set of colleges. But it lets off the hook the institutions who are on the other side of this big matching process. The book attempts to take some of that burden of asking students to make more well-informed college choices and share that burden by asking institutions to make room, and also to improve student outcomes for lower-socioeconomic status and minority students.

Q. Research shows that students have a higher chance of graduating from a more-selective college, which has led some to believe that improving match is a way to improve completion rates. But the book questions that, too. Why?

A. By helping students choose colleges where they’re more likely to complete and inducing good colleges to make room, we hope that low-income students and first-generation students who are more likely to undermatch wind up at institutions where they’re going to have better outcomes. That’s distinct from thinking that the overall completion rates are going to go up simply by getting some students to enroll in a more-selective institution.

This is a point that a number of researchers have pointed out, and it’s a function of whether you assume that the supply of seats in college classrooms is fixed, so that by moving some kids into a better-matched institution other kids move out, or whether you assume that colleges will make room. Even if you assume that colleges will make room, the number of kids shifting around is not dramatic, and so we wouldn’t expect national completion rates to be solved, necessarily, by match.

Q. In the conclusion you and the other editors raise the question of whether it’s match that matters for students or just going to a high-quality college. Is this something research can untangle? Because it seems really important.

A. If there were something unique about match you would expect to see students having worse outcomes if they were undermatched and worse outcomes if they were overmatched. And that’s not what you see in the research literature. I’m thinking of a couple of studies that are state-specific, one was conducted in Georgia and another in California, where we have the ability to identify students who were sort of the last kids admitted, the marginal students who just snuck into the four-year sector. Those are kids that you would label overmatched. In both of these studies those students wind up having good college outcomes like the kids on the campuses where they enrolled, and better college outcomes than students just like them who went to either the four-year broad-access sector or community colleges. I’m not sure that several studies that are state- or system-specific are enough to close the book on this particular area of inquiry.

Q. Match is not policy makers’ primary goal when it comes to college, and the book argues that some higher-education policies could actually reduce students’ chances of matching well. Could you give us an example?

A. The match literature has sort of ignored the fact that all of this is happening in the context of federal, state, and local policies, and some of these efforts are at odds with each other. One of the easiest examples for people to see has to do with free community college. We have some pretty compelling evidence that students, particularly low-income students, who enroll in public four-year institutions have better college outcomes — and labor market outcomes for that matter — than their nearly identical peers who enroll in the public two-year sector.

One challenge with the free community-college proposals is if we want to really set up the community-college sector and the students it serves for success, those institutions probably need more resources per student, rather than more students per resource. I’m not picking on community colleges here, I actually think community colleges have really heard everyone’s concerns about their lower graduation rates and lower rates of upward transfer, and there are lots of interesting reform efforts underway to try to improve student outcomes. We just have to be very careful that we don’t thwart some of the efforts by forcing community colleges to spread their resources even more thinly.

Q. Where would you like to see research on college match go from here?

A. Some of the most interesting work in this area will do a thorough job of understanding the very complex college-choice process that students with modest academic credentials and modest financial means go through.

My next recommendation for where the research could go is to really understand university policy and the role that institutions’ admissions and financial-aid offices play. I think that Mike Bastedo’s chapter in this book does a great job of laying out how many different competing perspectives exist just in admissions, and additional research to understand how universities engage with students and craft a class is really important. That’s a topic that has been studied, but the landscape has gotten to be more competitive. Revisiting the ways different types of institutions are handling that and which ones are coming out on top in terms of serving low-income students with regard to access and success is an important area that’s exceptionally policy-relevant, too.

Q. What do you hope readers who work with college-bound students take away from the book?

A. College choice is really complicated, because there are so many different types of fit that students and families have to pay attention to. The takeaway from the book is that academic fit is one that families and students and counselors need to take into account first and foremost. Then once they have constructed a list of colleges that would be good academic fits, moving on to looking at other facets of fit like finances, and geography, and whether it feels like the right place for them — that layer of preferences should be layered on top of a list of schools that are a good academic fit.

Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.