Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

As students transition to postsecondary education from the K-12 system they face important choices in terms of where to attend college and what to study. Recent research has focused increasingly on how and why students make different college choices, and the role of these choices in school and labor-market outcomes (e.g., Arcidiacono, Aucejo, and Hotz, 2015; Bowen, Chingos and MacPherson, 2012; Hoxby and Turner, 2015; Leslie and Oaxaca, 1998; Porter and Umbach, 2006; Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner, 2011; Wiswall and Zafar, 2015).  In this study, we use detailed statewide administrative data from Missouri to examine the role of high schools in explaining students’ initial college and major placements in the statewide system of 4-year public universities.

An innovation of our study is to empirically derive a measure of rigor for each university-by-major cell in the state public university system. Our empirically derived rigor measures for each system cell, combined with student-level measures of pre-entry academic preparation, allow us to measure the academic fit between students and their initial placements at the university-by-major level. We show that both across- and within-university sorting contribute substantially to the total system-wide variance in academic fit for individual students. Thus, while student sorting to universities has received the bulk of the attention in recent research, our finer academic-fit metrics measured at the university-by-major level reveal that sorting to majors within universities is also important.

We then go on to examine the explanatory power of high schools over student placements throughout the university system. We show that high schools are important predictors of the rigor of students’ initial university-by-major cells conditional on students’ own pre-entry academic preparation. High schools have significant explanatory power over both students’ initial placements into universities and their placements into majors conditional on the university attended. We further examine the predictive influence of specific high school characteristics. We find that a number of attributes of high schools influence the rigor of students’ university-by-major placements, including urbanicity and the socioeconomic status (SES) of students and the local area.

Our findings confirm and extend previous evidence on the systematic sorting patterns of students from high- and low-SES high schools. First, our results confirm previous research showing that conditional on their own pre-entry preparation, students from low-SES high schools are more likely to enroll in less rigorous university-by-major cells relative to their peers from high-SES high schools. This phenomenon has been referred to in previous studies as “undermatching” (Hoxby and Avery, 2012; Roderick, Coca, and Nagaoka, 2011; Rodriguez, 2015; Smith, Pender, and Howell, 2013). Using our fine-grained fit metrics at the university-by-major level, we also show that students from low-SES schools are also likely to enroll in less rigorous majors conditional on their university of attendance. We discuss several hypotheses that may explain the different sorting patterns that we see between students from high- and low-SES high schools, and their implications for differential human capital production for different types of students in postsecondary education.