The Missing “One-Offs”: The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low Income Students

We show that the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university.This is despite the fact that selective institutions would often cost them less, owing to generous financial aid, than the resource-poor two-year and non-selective four-year institutions to which they actually apply.Moreover, high-achieving, low-income students who do apply to selective institutions are admitted and graduate at high rates.We demonstrate that these low-income students’ application behavior differs greatly from that of their high-income counterparts who have similar achievement.The latter group generally follows the advice to apply to a few “par” colleges, a few “reach” colleges, and a couple of “safety” schools.We separate the low-income, high-achieving students into those whose application behavior is similar to that of their high-income counterparts (“achievement-typical” behavior) and those whose apply to no selective institutions (“income-typical” behavior).We show that income-typical students do not come from families or neighborhoods that are more disadvantaged than those of achievement-typical students.However, in contrast to the achievement-typical students, the income-typical students come from districts too small to support selective public high schools, are not in a critical mass of fellow high achievers, and are unlikely to encounter a teacher or schoolmate from an older cohort who attended a selective college.We demonstrate that widely-used policies-college admissions staff recruiting, college campus visits, college access programs-are likely to be ineffective with income-typical students, and we suggest policies that will be effective must depend less on geographic concentration of high achievers.