Why Colleges May Be Chasing the Wrong Numbers to Enroll More Low-Income Students

A new report by a pair of researchers known for their work on low-income students suggests colleges are thinking about serving that group in the wrong way.

The findings — from Caroline M. Hoxby, a professor of economics at Stanford University, and Sarah Turner, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia — come at a time when colleges, especially elite ones, have faced increasing public pressure to admit more low-income students.

Hoxby and Turner’s own research on undermatching — the notion that high-achieving but needy students often enroll at colleges below their intellectual caliber — suggested that some low-income students weren’t applying to selective institutions, and that colleges could make up ground simply by getting them to apply. Colleges took note.

But the duo also urged institutions to use thoughtful and data-driven approaches to better serve low-income students. What happened instead, Hoxby and Turner told The Chronicle on Friday, is that colleges rushed to increase their overall percentage of low-income students, and seemed to miss the bit about careful planning.

“People at some level didn’t pay attention to what we said in those articles,” Hoxby said. “That message got completely lost.”

The thrust of their most recent project, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper titled “Measuring Opportunity in U.S. Higher Education,” elaborates on that thought.

Specifically, the researchers challenge the idea that colleges should be judged successful based primarily on the percentage of their students whose families are in the bottom quintile of national earners or who are eligible for Pell Grants, the main federal student-aid program based on need.

Hoxby and Turner also critique the often-cited intergenerational-mobility measurement, a method pioneered by a Stanford economist named Raj Chetty and popularized in The New York Times. That gauge measures how well institutions’ low-income students climb income quintiles later in life.

A Warping Metric

But how institutions do on that metric, according to Hoxby and Turner, is warped by the fact that colleges aren’t picking from the same applicant pool. In other words, colleges that serve populations with a larger percentage of low-income students end up enrolling low-income students, and are rewarded on the metric. Meanwhile, colleges located in affluent areas are penalized.

“The universities would be rewarded based on their circumstances, not their behavior or effort,” they wrote.

Geography influences outcomes too, the researchers say. In California, which has a wide range of incomes, a college may have an easier job of proving that its alumni increase their earnings later in life. That’s more difficult, Hoxby and Turner say, in a state like Wisconsin, which doesn’t have a high population of extremely low or extremely high earners. And if that’s the case, it’s harder to prove economic mobility.

Hoxby said the intention of Chetty and his fellow researchers was good, but “they’re sort of getting it exactly wrong.”

Opportunity Insights, the nonprofit organization that developed the intergenerational-mobility measure, and that Chetty leads, did not answer a request for comment on Friday.

The researchers propose what they call a more-nuanced method of quantifying economic mobility.

It chops a state’s potential applicants into five-percentile segments — rather than quintiles — and measures that against the income profiles of a college’s in-state students. The more closely the two pictures resemble each other, the better the college represents the state’s population. Using that method, colleges would get a better idea of the student populations they’re not enrolling.

The chase to enroll more low-income students can have unintended consequences, they said. Students who are just above the bottom 20th percentile might receive less support from a college that’s seeking solely to increase students from the bottom quintile. Those just above eligibility for a Pell Grant could find themselves arbitrarily cut out of the equation.

Hoxby and Turner stressed that their research is not meant to be prescriptive. They have no desire, they said, to gauge which colleges are doing well or badly. Rather, they said, they want institutions to set their own goals. The hope is to provide a new measuring stick that will allow colleges and their constituents to hold the institutions accountable.

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.