The Origins and Implications of Postsecondary Academic Mismatch

Postsecondary academic mismatch occurs when students attend colleges where their classmates have substantially weaker or stronger academic backgrounds than their own. Academic mismatch takes two forms, "undermatch" ("big fish in small ponds") and "overmatch" ("small fish in big ponds"). This dissertation uses data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to study the origins and implications of postsecondary academic mismatch for college-goers in the United States. Drawing upon cross-tabular and graphical analyses, generalized linear models, and quasi-experiments, this study comes to four conclusions. First, where students live and the density of colleges around them is associated with whether they attend colleges where they are academically mismatched. Second, most American college-goers conduct constrained college searches that result in them being admitted to only one or two academically similar colleges. Consequently, the academic mismatch students encounter in college is partially determined by their college search. Third, the college-going culture of the high schools students attend is significantly associated with whether or not students conduct robust college searches. It is also associated with whether students choose more selective colleges over less selective ones when they are admitted to colleges of differing levels of selectivity. Fourth, academic mismatch and college selectivity are distinct, opposing forces that both affect the probability that students will earn degrees. Quasi-experimental evidence suggests that there is an "overmatch penalty" associated with attending a college while overmatched. Opposing this force is a compensatory "selectivity dividend," the size of which varies by the level of college selectivity attended. Consequently, whether overmatching reduces a student's probability of earning a degree depends on whether the selectivity dividend associated with the college attended is larger than the penalty incurred for overmatching. These findings are discussed in light of past research on academic mismatch. Their implications for public policy and sociological theory are considered