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NJ Center for Teaching and Learning

Progressive Science Initiative® (PSI®) reversed the achievement gap for advanced placement

Conceptual and Methodological Problems in Research on College Undermatch "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 advocate