In identifying whether universities provide opportunities for low-income students, there is a measurement challenge: different institutions face students with different incomes and preparation. We show how a hypothetical university's "relevant pool"--the students from whom it could plausibly draw--affects popular measures: the Pell…

For this study, the authors designed an experiment to test whether some high-achieving, low-income students would change their behavior if they knew more about colleges and, more importantly, whether a cost-effective way to help such students realize their full array of college opportunities can be implemented. This was done by randomly assigning…

The extent to which colleges and universities provide opportunities for students from the most economically disadvantaged families is an important indicator of the potential for U.S. higher education to promote intergenerational mobility. Yet the measurement of "opportunity" for low-income students at the level of individual colleges and…