Sunday quick takes

A little followup

I wanted to do a quick follow up on Thursday’s post about the paucity of kids from poor families at selective colleges. I hadn’t realized this at the time, but a forthcoming paper from Susan Dynarski, CJ Libassi, Katherine Michelmore, and Stephanie Owen reports on a new experiment that seems promising in reducing undermatching.

What they did, basically, was reach out to a bunch of students who would qualify for generous financial aid packages if they were admitted and give them a formal pre-application guarantee of the aid package. And it worked: “The offer substantially increased application (68 percent vs 26 percent) and enrollment rates (27 percent vs 12 percent).”

This is super promising and schools should do it. There is frankly no excuse not to! But I do think it’s worth noting that even here, the actual application and enrollment rates are kind of disturbing low. This great Erica Green article that came out Thursday in the NYT, however, speaks to the breadth of the program. She …