Academic match and fit: What can we learn from stated preferences, student actions, and collegiate outcomes?
Jessica Howell, Amal Kumar, and Matea Pender's paper presented at AEI's event, "Matching all students to postsecondary opportunities: How college choice is influenced by institutional, state, and federal policy" on August 4, 2015
American Enterprise Institute
A small body of research has examined strategies to increase college enrollment rates, which would improve the percentage of students who match with any institution of higher education. These strategies include allowing students to submit standardized test scores to an additional college free of charge, assistance completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), text message reminders of importance deadlines, near- peer counseling, and supplemental guidance counseling. All of these strategies are relatively inexpensive, making them potential private-sector or institutional-level approaches to mitigating under match.
Due in large part to these promising efforts, the topic of college match has become a key higher education policy goal of the Obama administration as it seeks to meet its ambitious goal of having America lead the world in the proportion of citizens with postsecondary degrees by 2020. The White House hosted two summits related to undermatching in 2014, bringing together hundreds of colleges that made new commitments to help students from low-income families succeed in higher education. The impending reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, legislation affecting nearly all portions of federal higher education policy, provides an opportunity for Congress and the White House to work together on common goals of increasing college access and completion—and strategies to improve college matching could be incorporated into the legislation.
