Undermatching continues to create barriers to access to post-secondary opportunities for low-income students from urban public high schools. According to Belasco and Trivette (2015), postsecondary undermatch occurs when students fail to enroll at a college or university that possesses a level of selectivity their academic credentials would permit…

Past work and college-access programs often treat college knowledge as discrete pieces of information and focus on the amount of available college information. I use ethnographic and multiwave interview data to compare college-aspiring working- and middle-class black 9th and 11th graders across almost two years in high school along with their…

This study examines a new profession in China and those who inhabit it--admissions counselors who advise Chinese students on how to apply to colleges in the United States. This study was conducted in the international divisions of eight Chinese public high schools in five cities in China and aims to fill the void in our knowledge of the vital role…

This study explored the experiences of regional admissions counselors related to their recruitment of Black and Hispanic students and how counselors embedded personal experiences in recruitment strategies they used at multiple regional admissions centers of an R1 and primarily White institution (PWI). The research comes at a time when data from…

While many high schools reproduce social inequalities in college access, little is known about the schools that successfully reduce them. To this end, Gorana Ilic and James E. Rosenbaum studied an urban high school that expressed a strong commitment to supporting all students' college applications. In this article, they describe the organizational…

Packed within the big bundle of worries that high school students and their parents bring to the college admission process, the bulkiest item is often how they will pay for it. And too often, experts say, it is not about lacking money, but lacking information. There is often a lot of confusion about college costs, and while it might simply…

Applicants from high-performing high schools routinely enter the college admission process overscheduled and overwhelmed. Stress and sleep-deprivation have reached epidemic proportions at competitive high schools, while rates of depression and anxiety among US teens and young adults have skyrocketed. For this generation of students, the stakes…

We conduct a field experiment to analyze barriers disabled students face when entering higher education institutions. Fictitious high-school graduates request information regarding the admission process and special accommodations to ease studying. Potential applicants randomly reveal one of four impairment types. Response rates are similar for all…

The purpose of this qualitative exploratory case study was to examine the high school counselors' perception of their ability to influence low socioeconomic students' postsecondary enrollment decisions in seven Title I high schools in southern California. Perna and Thomas' Student Success model and the Delivery System of the American School…

Education leaders have long worried that many high school students don't get adequate help in choosing a college. Nationwide, there is an average of one full-time guidance counselor per 315 public high school students, according to a 2003 report by the National Center for Education Statistics. And counselors don't necessarily spend much time…

This dissertation focuses on the growing role of private, for-profit Independent Educational Consultants (IECs) in the college application process. Over the past two decades, an "admission industrial complex" of commercial enterprises designed to help students strategize about admissions and give them information about colleges has…

The White House will soon unveil a final version of its "college scorecard"--an online tool giving college-bound students and their families a hype-free snapshot of reliable information about any U.S. campus: real costs, graduation rates, student debt statistics, and earning potential of graduates. The college scorecard is a good idea…

This paper reports the results of a pilot study, using a randomized controlled trial to provide college counseling to high-achieving students from relatively poor families. We followed 107 high school seniors through the college admissions process in 2006-2007; we selected 52 of these students at random, offering them ten hours of individualized…

The entrepreneurial admission sector is comprised of commercial enterprises aimed at helping students increase their odds of admission, as well as providing general college information to the masses. As for-profit entities, a goal of companies in this sector is to maximize revenue and profit. Existing research identifies four main activities as…

The girls of girls' schools, the author believes, are a kind of Platonic Form of American girl, an ideal to which most of the rest of society, of the country's meritocratic system, aspires for their daughters, a reflection of one's deepest values. She believes girls all over the country, in all high schools, want The Dream. They want to achieve…