Only a small number of top-performing high school students from low-income backgrounds get admitted to elite colleges. This so-called undermatching problem has gained the attention of academic researchers, the White House and the news media in recent years. Yet the studies that initially triggered this worry were focused on the much broader issue of the numerous barriers low-income students face in trying to get to college -- usually a public one -- and earn a degree. A research conference the American Enterprise Institute hosted Tuesday tried to shift the “college match” conversation away from the Ivy League and back to its initial focus on more typical students and institutions. The event featured discussions of seven new working papers, which covered a wide swath of the topic. “That are lots of reasons that undermatching is intuitively appealing,” said Andrew Kelly, director of AEI’s Center on Higher Education Reform, adding that “the discussions also felt narrow at times.”

August 5, 2015 ・ From Inside Higher Ed