Educators, researchers, and policymakers across the political spectrum agree that the nation must send more of its young people to college and find ways to help them graduate--especially young people from low-income families. To that end, in 2010, MDRC and a group of partners developed College Match, an innovative school-based college advising…

This guide is designed for counselors, teachers, and advisers who work with high school students from low-income families and students who are the first in their families to pursue a college education. It offers strategies for helping these students identify, consider, and enroll in "match" colleges, that is, selective colleges that are…

Taking advantage of lottery-like features in New York City's high school admissions process, previous MDRC reports have provided rigorous evidence that new small public high schools are narrowing the educational attainment gap and markedly improving high school graduation prospects, particularly for disadvantaged students. The new findings in this…

Most high school reform efforts understandably focus on boosting the success of low-income students who are underachieving academically, but in every school district where students struggle, there are academically capable low-income and minority students who do graduate prepared for college. Yet each year, many of these students choose to attend…

Low-income students are at particular risk of not persisting to earn a certificate or degree, often because of competing priorities, financial pressures, and inadequate preparation for college. One form of financial assistance designed explicitly to reward students' academic success is a performance-based scholarship, paid contingent on attaining…

This report describes the effects of Project Graduation Really Achieves Dreams (GRAD) on student progress at three high schools in Houston (the initiative's original site) and at high schools in two other school districts (Columbus, Ohio, and Atlanta, Georgia). MDRC--a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization--conducted a third-party…

This paper is organized around three central questions: (1) What should be the primary goals of high school reform and what is the critical set of outcomes that matter for students? (2)Shat do we know about the strategies schools could use to pursue those goals? and (3) What are the implications of these strategies for the development of high…