Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

1-1-2017

JEL Codes

I21, I23, I24

Abstract

This paper explores factors explaining why so many high-achieving, low-income students apply to and enroll at universities with relatively low academic standards, despite generous financial aid packages and evidence that these students would be successful at colleges that are more selective. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was used to gather data, and the entire file is freely available at academic.depauw.edu/hbarreto_web/working. A probit analysis confirms an established result that low-income students are more likely to undermatch. The key result is that as the distance between a student’s home and the university they attend increases, the probability that the student will undermatch decreases. At a distance of 500 miles between a student’s home and college, the difference in the probability of undermatching between low-income students and high-income students is 25.5 percentage points. At 3,000 miles, the gap is only 8.7 percentage points.

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