Finding the right college: are you aiming too low?

September 30, 8:29 AMCollege Admissions ExaminerLauren Starkey

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There’s a college dropout crisis in America. Just 56 percent of freshmen nationwide graduate within four years, and the time it takes to earn a degree is growing. Economist Mark Schneider has dubbed the worst offenders (such as UMass Boston, where only 33 percent graduate in six years) “failure factories.”

According to the authors of Crossing the Finish Line, Completing College at America’s Public Universities, the problem isn’t what you might expect. It’s not that college-level work is too difficult, or even that higher education is too expensive (although some students do drop out for economic reasons). Instead, there’s a mismatch between overqualified students and the schools they attend.

Finding the right fit, academically, socially, and financially, has always been critical, but William Bowen, Michael McPherson, and Matthew Chingos report that many students choose to ignore the academics and “undermatch.” And this undermatching is among the key causes of our current college dropout crisis. “The intuition is that if you want to be sure you’re going to graduate, you’re going to go someplace easy,” said McPherson, who is the president of the Chicago-based Spencer Foundation. “That turns out to not be true.”

According to Education Week, the conclusions of Crossing the Finish Line mirror those of researchers at the Consortium on Chicago School Research, who published a study of Chicago schools last year. They concluded that while “90 percent of the Chicago school system’s most academically advanced students have the qualifications to attend colleges that are at least ‘somewhat selective,’ only a fraction ever get there. Those researchers calculated that fewer than half the students in the city’s advanced academic programs enroll in postsecondary schools that match their qualifications.”

So why the undermatching? My list of Ten Worst Reasons to Choose a College includes many of them. One of the Chicago researchers, Jenny Nagaoka, notes, “a fair amount of the undermatch can be attributed to the fact that the most qualified kids tend to go to the same schools that their classmates are going to. That may be OK for their classmates, but not for them.”

Add to the buddy system the tendency to go for a “brand name” school whether or not that school offers the right academic fit, and the comfort of applying only where you know you’ll get in, and you’ve got tens of thousands of students who are reaching too low. As you narrow down your list of schools, keep undermatching in mind. Schools differ widely in academic expectations, and attending a college where the workload is too easy could put your degree at risk. Apply only to those schools that are truly the right fit, socially, financially,---and academically.