William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos and Michael S. McPherson: Higher-ed solutions crucial

Bowen is president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Princeton University. Chingos is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government at Harvard University and research associate at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. McPherson is president of the Spencer Foundation.

Our recent book, “Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities (Princeton University Press),” demonstrates that if this country is to regain its leadership in higher education, it must fix two interconnected problems:

(1) The stagnant level of overall educational attainment measured by a bachelor’s degree attainment rate that hovers around 30 percent, and (2) the huge disparities in educational outcomes associated with socioeconomic status (SES) and race/ethnicity.

At the flagship universities we studied, fewer than half of the first-time freshmen in the 1999 academic year graduated in four years and just over three-quarters graduated from these leading universities within six years. The six-year bachelor’s degree completion rate was fully 11 percentage points higher for students from high-SES families than for students from low-SES families with similar SAT/ACT scores and high school grades.

If the United States is serious about meeting President Barack Obama’s goal of leading the world in educational attainment by 2020, we must find ways to graduate larger numbers of students from low-SES backgrounds and from the burgeoning Hispanic population.

Improving graduation rates for students from the traditionally more successful population of affluent white students is not going to do the job — even if focusing on this privileged group were the responsible thing to do. This group is just not large enough.

What can be done about this daunting problem? There are no “quick fixes” or “magic bullets.” But an important element of any solution, as our research indicates, is to address what we call the “undermatching” problem.

“Undermatching” occurs when high-achieving high school students who surely would be admitted to a selective four-year college instead attend a less challenging four-year college, a two-year college or no college at all. Data from North Carolina indicate that among students in that state with the SAT scores and high school grades needed to enroll at a very selective university, fully 40 percent failed to do this.

This problem is particularly pronounced among students from low-income families, 59 percent of whom undermatched, as compared with 27 percent of their classmates from high-income families. (A separate study of undermatching in the Chicago Public Schools yields results that are highly consistent with our findings from North Carolina.)

Undermatching does not just infringe on parents’ bragging rights. It has major consequences for completion rates because there is such a strong association between the selectivity of institutions attended and graduation rates.

Among the highly qualified students who undermatched to a less-selective four-year college, only 66 percent graduated within six years, as compared with 81 percent of students who matched to a highly selective public university. It is also the case that starting at a two-year college instead of a four-year college reduces substantially the chances that a student will ever earn a bachelor’s degree.

These findings are in one sense counterintuitive, as one might expect it to be easier to graduate from a less-demanding university. But our data consistently demonstrate that all groups of students — including rich and poor, black and white — are most likely to graduate if they attend the most selective university that will admit them.

There are reasons why this is so. We believe that this relentlessly consistent pattern is the result of the higher expectations, more talented classmates and additional resources available at more selective universities.

Solving the undermatch problem will not be easy. We find that two-thirds of undermatched students failed to even apply to one of the selective universities that would almost surely have admitted them. But fixing this problem is far less daunting than, say, improving the quality of America’s high schools.

After all, the students involved have already, despite whatever adversity they may have faced, succeeded in high school. Now they just need some assistance navigating the college admissions process and some encouragement to take advantage of opportunities that are already available to them.

In our view, solving the undermatching problem presents an opportunity to both reduce disparities in educational attainment along socioeconomic lines while simultaneously increasing this country’s overall level of educational attainment. This is a “win-win” proposition that we cannot afford to ignore.