The backlash against the “college for all” movement was overdue. For too long, high schools treated a four-year degree as the default destination for too many students, without paying enough attention to how well students were prepared to embark on that pathway, the quality and costs of the colleges they might apply to, or the availability of alternatives that might be a better fit. But today we risk overcorrecting. The danger is replacing that overly broad default assumption with an overly confident effort to direct more students away from the path of a traditional four-year degree.
The growth of high-quality career and technical education programs, experiential learning opportunities, and other career-focused pathways has been an important and much-needed development. And there is good evidence behind the enthusiasm. Rigorous studies of Career Academies, technical high schools, and P-TECH have all found gains in earnings, graduation, and postsecondary attainment for participating students. But corrections can swing the pendulum too far in the other direction—and, as the history of K–12 education reform has shown, they often do.
As momentum gathers toward “multiple pathways,” we should be careful not to interpret modest grades, humble test scores, or other lackluster measures of college readiness as ironclad evidence that students would be better off pursuing something other than a four-year degree. A student’s academic record can help predict whether she will complete college. But the actual choice confronting that student is different: Would attending college leave her better off than pursuing her best available alternative?
One useful way to think about the problem is through the possibility of making mistakes in two different directions. Any rule we use to guide students toward different post-secondary paths will inherently produce some false positives and some false negatives. The first type of mistake is familiar. We encourage a student to attend a four-year college, but he struggles and ultimately drops out, incurring both financial and opportunity costs. This person may well have been better served by another pathway. That is a false positive: We recommended college when another option would have produced a better outcome. The other type of mistake runs in the opposite direction: we discourage a student whose academic record raises questions about their college readiness but who, with access to the right college and sufficient supports, would have completed a degree and benefited substantially. That is the false negative.
Much of the post-secondary debate in recent years has focused on the first error. However, recent research suggests we should take the second type of error more seriously.
A study of public four-year universities in Texas compared students just above and below admissions cutoffs, allowing researchers to isolate the impact of enrolling in college for students near the threshold. Those just above the admissions cutoff, and thereby eligible to enroll, increased their bachelor’s degree attainment by about 12 percentage points and eventually raised their earnings by roughly 8 percent compared to those students who fell just below the line and were not eligible to enroll. What is particularly important to keep in mind is that these were students near the margin of admission rather than the strongest applicants—meaning we would expect them to be at greater risk of dropping out.
A similar study in Georgia reached a similar conclusion. Enrolling in one of the state’s public four-year universities increased bachelor’s degree attainment and was estimated to raise household income around age 30 by roughly 17 percent, with larger benefits observed for students coming from lower-income high schools.
A note of caution: These studies apply to students who were just above and below admissions eligibility thresholds, so the findings should not be generalized to all students whose academic records might raise questions about their readiness to succeed in college-level courses. Still, they provide a useful reminder that students with a lower predicted probability of completing college do not necessarily face lower expected returns from attending.
For example, imagine a student whose academic record suggests only a 50 percent probability of completing a bachelor’s degree. That estimate is useful but, in isolation, tells us very little about whether college is the right choice. The decision also depends on a host of other factors, including which colleges are realistically accessible, eligibility for financial aid packages, out-of-pocket costs, the availability of wrap-around supports, the long-term payoff from completing, the opportunity costs of enrollment, and the alternative pathways actually available.
As important, the costs of the two errors may differ substantially in the long run. Sending a poorly matched student to college can mean debt, lost time, and foregone earnings. Steering away a student who would have completed can mean giving up a lifetime of higher earnings and other benefits generally associated with attaining a degree.
This is where the distinction between false positives and false negatives becomes especially useful. Any benchmark used to classify students as more or less likely to complete college changes the balance between the two errors. A more restrictive threshold may reduce the number of students who enroll and struggle, while increasing the number who are discouraged from attending even though they would have benefited. A more relaxed threshold shifts those risks in the other direction. That should make us cautious about replacing the old “college for all” model with another simplistic approach. If prediction cannot usefully tell us which path would be better for any given individual, then we should focus instead on helping students more carefully weigh the tradeoffs involved.
Research suggests that high school advising can be an important part of that process. Two recent studies are instructive. Bottom Line, an intensive advising program, pairs lower-income students with professional advisers who help them develop college lists, navigate the application and financial aid processes, compare options, and decide where to enroll. Advising continues into college for students who attend participating institutions. An evaluation found the program increased bachelor’s degree attainment, with much of the effect appearing to come from students enrolling at colleges with stronger average outcomes.
A second study examined a very different advising model. Across 62 Michigan high schools, seniors were offered an 18-week college-planning curriculum delivered largely by current teachers and school staff. The course addressed two- and four-year options, the costs and benefits of college, navigating application and financial aid processes, and broader career planning. The course did not increase college enrollment overall. Instead, it influenced who enrolled. Enrollment increased among students with stronger academic records and decreased among some students with weaker records. Ultimately, the program was found to increase longer-term persistence and associate-degree attainment among more academically prepared students.
That pattern is especially relevant to the current debate. The objective was not simply to push more—or fewer—students toward college. Better information and structured support appear to have helped some students enroll who otherwise might not have, while leading others to reconsider enrollment when it wasn’t the best available path for them.
But better advising should not simply mean giving high school advisors or teachers more discretion to decide who is “college material.” In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein describe how professional judgments can vary significantly across decision-makers confronting similar cases. Their proposed solution is what they term “decision hygiene,” which involves systematically assessing the relevant components of a particular judgment using the best available information before forming a conclusion.
Neither study noted above describes its intervention in those terms, but both embody a similar idea. They break a complicated decision about choosing a post-secondary pathway into a more manageable set of questions rather than relying on a single predictor or a general impression of whether a student is “college ready.” Applied to high school advising, even modest improvements to the process can improve the odds that a student will select the pathway that leaves them better off than the alternatives. Those judgments will still be imperfect. But with a more intentional approach, advisers can reduce reliance on incomplete information or overly broad assumptions.
Ultimately, the evidence points to a critical question that is often overlooked: How can we help students choose the post-secondary option that improves their long-term outcomes the most, while reducing the costs of errors in both directions? Answering that question depends on preparing students for multiple possible pathways and ensuring that valuable and accessible alternatives to a four-year college degree exist. Advising should help students evaluate those options using the best available information about the likely benefits, costs, supports, and fit, customized to their specific circumstances.
It also means preserving valuable options for as long as possible. When uncertainty is unavoidable—which will always be the case when discussing teenagers—keeping multiple viable pathways open may be more valuable than sorting students earlier.
