Maybe Most Parents Need to Worry More About College Choice

Here’s a novel thought: most American families worry too little about what kind of college their children attend.

Obviously, a substantial number of parents agonize far too much about the fine gradations of college prestige. Research has suggested that whether a child attends an Ivy League college, for instance, has relatively little bearing on his or her future success.

But whether a child graduates from college has an enormous effect on future success. And many colleges do a notably poor job of turning their freshmen into graduates.

I have addressed this topic in earlier articles and posts, and a new report from researchers at Georgetown University does a nice job of highlighting the issues through charts.

Comparing students with similar SAT scores, they find a huge difference in the completion rate of those who attend a selective college and those who attend an open-access college. (Their definition of selective includes 468 colleges, based on criteria set by Barron’s.)

Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce calculation using NCES - Barron’s Admissions Competitive Index Data Files and data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), 1988, 2000.

Perhaps most incredibly, children who score between 1,000 and 1,099 on the SAT and attend a selective college are more likely to graduate than those who scored above 1,200 and attended an open-access college.

Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce calculation using NCES - Barron’s Admissions Competitive Index Data Files and data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), 1988, 2000.

These patterns play a large role in perpetuating inequality, the authors note, because higher-income children are much more likely to attend selective colleges than low-income children. The report emphasizes that the variation in college quality has an especially large effect on minorities.

Over the last decade, the growth in college enrollment among white students has flowed overwhelmingly to selective colleges. White enrollment at open-access colleges remained virtually unchanged between 1995 and 2009, while white enrollment at selective colleges increased substantially. By contrast, enrollment of Latinos and African-Americans increased much more at open-access colleges than at selective colleges.

Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of IPEDS data; various years.

One major reason for the trend is that many more high-achieving minorities attend open-access colleges than high-achieving whites do.

Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce using PowerStats from U.S. Department of Education, NCES, 2007-8 National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies (NPSAS:08)

Ultimately, these differences in college choices matter because of enormous financial return to education in today’s economy.

Source: Carnevale et al. (2011), “The College Payoff.”