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…

High school counselors play a vital role in helping students prepare for attending college. They are the link between students and families and institutions, providing counseling, information, and motivation to help students make it through their enrollment journeys. Along the way, they have to help students cope with a wide variety of challenges:…

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 2013 study, "Evaluation of the College Possible Program: Results From a Randomized Controlled Trial", investigated the effect of the "College Possible" program, which is designed to serve low-income high school students by providing SAT/ACT test preparation, financial aid consulting, and college admissions guidance in an…

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 article reports on the studies of Caroline M. Hoxby, a professor of economics at Stanford University; and Sarah E. Turner, a professor of economics and education at the University of Virginia, who examine why bright students from low-income families do not apply to select colleges. After analyzing millions of records from the College Board,…

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 high-school seniors drifting in and out of the office in New York should be weighing financial-aid offers and deciding where to go to college. But some of them have yet to begin the process of applying for student aid. This article describes a nonprofit group in Harlem which gives last-minute help to students uncertain about applying for…

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…

Every school has an organizational habitus that represents its allocated resources, mission, perception about students' cultural capital, and the school counselor's expectation and behavior related to college admissions. A school's mission, resources, and assumptions about students and their families affect the college choice process of students…

While benefits of college matriculation are well-established, the portal controlling access to higher education is the institutional application. The bulk of the college application process takes place during a student's senior or 12th-grade year; however, parents and caregivers of high school students need to know that the quest for college…

This document is a personal account of a college admission professional that traveled to meet perspective students. Out of 44 schools that he visited, the final school left him with a powerful impression of what this process is for young people and those who make their living working with them. Most people agree that today?s college admission…

This paper reports a survey of 16 to 17 year old students who took part in a school based project activity designed to motivate them to consider a career in engineering. The scheme can be considered a success in that an uppermost estimated figure of 19% more students were recruited to engineering undergraduate courses than might otherwise have…