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Identifying the best set of colleges to which to apply is not a simple task. The importance of any one application depends on the likely outcomes of other applications, and this logic and information is difficult to grasp for anyone, let alone high school students. To simplify this task, the College Board recommends that students submit a total of four to eight applications to a combination of "reach," "match," and "safety" schools. However, many academically well-qualified students do not follow this advice, primarily by selecting too many "safety" schools relative to "reach" and "match" schools. Students who do not follow the College Board's guidelines for creating a college list limit their postsecondary options, in some cases dramatically so. At one extreme, students who do not apply to a four-year college at all completely limit their choice set. Similarly, well-qualified students who only apply to less/nonselective colleges consign themselves to institutions with relatively few resources, low graduation rates, and academically weaker college peers. Low income students typically underapply with regard to both the quantity and quality of college applications compared to higher-income students with similar academic qualifications. Thus, the choice of college application portfolio likely serves as an important mechanism that differentiates the college choices of low-income students from those of others. Provided in this research brief is a discussion of application barriers students may encounter which may be procedural, geographical, cultural, informational, or financial. Potential solutions to reduce and remove these barriers include programs that substantially alter the usual application processes, provide information about and support outreach by colleges, promote the use of college application fee waivers, and improve college counseling. Another natural approach to favorably influencing the college application choices of students is to provide them with additional college counseling designed to overcome informational and procedural barriers. [This work is the product of a series of collaborations between the College Board and the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.]

The limited availability of college counseling for many students, especially those from low-income families, means that advising and ready assistance with each stage of the college search and application process is lacking. The research summarized in this brief indicates that the deficiencies in the quality and quantity of college counseling available to low-income students helps to explain the differences observed in application behavior and subsequent college choices between low income students and their more affluent peers. The primary barriers to more widely available and effective counseling are rooted in school finances, counselor training programs, and competing demands for counselors' time. One set of solutions provides additional funding and infrastructure for college counseling, often in the public schools themselves. Other solutions provide the necessary counseling in other forms, including in nonprofit programs that provide after-school services.

We investigate the efficacy of text messaging campaigns to remind students about and support them with key steps in the college search, application, selection and transition process. First, in collaboration with the College Board and uAspire, both national non-profit organizations, we implemented text-message based outreach and advising to students in over 700 US high schools that primarily serve large shares of low-income students. Second, we collaborated with several school districts in the state of Texas to implement a school-based version of the intervention. In the national sample, treatment students received outreach approximately once per month from uAspire counselors, whereas in the Texas sample, treatment students received outreach once every one to two weeks from their high school counselors. In both samples, outreach began in Spring 2015 and continued through September 2016. We tested these interventions with concurrent cluster randomized control trials with randomization at the school level. In contrast to the national version of the intervention, which tended to produce null effects, the school-based intervention yielded positive and significant impacts on several college-going steps and on college enrollment for certain subgroups. We discuss key differences between the two versions of the intervention that may have contributed to these divergent results.

This paper reports the results of a randomized trial of the College Possible program, which provides two years of college preparatory work for high school juniors and seniors in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The trial involved 238 students, including 134 who were randomly selected for admission to the program. The results indicate that the College Possible program significantly increased both applications and enrollment to both four-year colleges and selective four-year colleges; we estimate that initial enrollment at four-year colleges increased by more than 15 percentage points for program participants, but find little evidence of any effect of the program on ACT performance or college enrollment overall. [For the What Works Clearinghouse Quick Review of this document, see ED544550.]

This paper reports the results of a pilot study, using a randomized controlled trial to provide college counseling to high-achieving students from relatively poor families. We followed 107 high school seniors through the college admissions process in 2006-2007; we selected 52 of these students at random, offering them ten hours of individualized college advising with a nearby college counselor. The counseling had little or no effect on college application quality, but does seem to have influenced the choice of where the students applied to college. We estimate that students offered counseling were 7.9 percentage points more likely than students not offered counseling to enroll in colleges ranked by Barron's as "Most Competitive", though this effect was not statistically significant. More than one-third of the students who accepted the offer of counseling did not follow through on all of the advice they received. Going beyond the framework of the randomized experiment, our statistical analysis suggests that counseling would have had approximately twice as much effect if all students matched with counselors had followed the advice of the counselors.

Early admissions is widely used by selective colleges and universities. We identify some basic facts about early admissions policies, including the admissions advantage enjoyed by early applicants and patterns in application behavior, and propose a game-theoretic model that matches these facts. The key feature of the model is that colleges want to admit students who are enthusiastic about attending, and early admissions programs give students an opportunity to signal this enthusiasm.