Research Highlights Article
December 16, 2025
Navigating the college choice process
Intensive advising can substantially increase the likelihood of degree attainment for low-income students.
Source: monkeybusinessimages
Only about one in ten students from low-income families earns a bachelor's degree by age 25, while roughly half of students from high-income families do. This gap persists even among students with similar academic abilities, suggesting that factors beyond preparation play a significant role.
In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Andrew Barr and Benjamin Castleman demonstrate that intensive college advising can substantially close this gap by helping students to make better decisions about where to enroll.
The college application process presents formidable challenges in navigating complex tradeoffs between quality, cost, and fit. Students from affluent families often receive guidance from parents and/or paid consultants, while low-income students typically lack such support.
In an interview with the AEA, Castleman reflected on his experience as a high school teacher in Rhode Island. His students "were really talented and hardworking despite growing up in high-poverty environments, but most of them still struggled to go on to college or to succeed once they were there."
To evaluate whether intensive advising could address these challenges, Barr and Castleman conducted a randomized controlled trial of Bottom Line, a college advising program operating in Massachusetts, New York, and Illinois. Bottom Line recruits high school juniors with a GPA of 2.5 or higher and family income below 200 percent of the federal poverty line and provides sustained, individualized support.
A big part of the story is that these advisors are developing relationships with individuals who lack information about how to navigate these choices.
Andrew Barr
Students meet with professional advisors every three to four weeks throughout their senior year, spending, on average, a total of 10 to 15 hours to identify well-matched colleges, complete applications, navigate financial aid, and decide where to enroll. Students who attend certain target institutions also receive ongoing campus-based advising.
Among eligible applicants, the researchers randomly assigned students to a group receiving advising services or to a control group. The sample included 2,422 students from the high school graduating classes of 2015 and 2016.
The authors found that students offered advising support were 7.6 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor's degree within five years of high school, a 16 percent increase relative to the control group. When considering bachelor’s degrees attained within six years after high school, this effect grew to 9.6 percentage points, an 18 percent increase.
The researchers employed several strategies to understand why advising produced such large effects. Using survey data on the colleges in which students expressed an interest before entering the program, they found that between one-third and two-thirds of low-income students initially favored institutions that were suboptimal for their academic profiles.
Moreover, students with the most misaligned initial preferences showed the largest gains from advising. Using a new approach that incorporates causal forest methods within a mediation framework, the researchers estimated that roughly 70 percent of the improvement in degree attainment resulted from students enrolling at higher-quality institutions.
"A big part of the story is that these advisors are developing relationships with individuals who lack information about how to navigate these choices," Barr said. “They're able to shift individuals toward higher-quality institutions as their initial enrollment institutions, and that seems to drive these increases in degree attainment.”
The price tag of increasing college degrees
The chart below shows the direct costs of several rigorously evaluated strategies for increasing bachelor’s degree attainment. Bottom Line (BL) appears more cost-effective at increasing degrees per $1,000 than other prominent policies, such as financial aid, early-childhood education, reduced class size, or school spending.
Helping students with the college application process also proved to be cost-effective. At roughly $2,000 per student for precollege advising, the intervention generated approximately 0.03 additional bachelor's degrees per $1,000 spent, with consistent effects across sites, cohorts, and advisors. By comparison, financial aid programs typically produce less than 0.01 additional degrees per $1,000.
Providing intensive advising to all eligible high-school students would cost approximately $2.7 billion, roughly 10 percent of what doubling the Pell Grant would require. This suggests that strategies to improve students’ ability to select more well-matched institutions may be more effective than simply making college more affordable.
The findings may have broader implications for policymakers. As Castleman observed, "There's been a steady effort to shift the way that we support individuals through complex challenges—not only in education, but also in fields like health and housing—through informational, tech-forward, and AI-first interventions, but human-centric approaches may generate substantially larger effects."
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“Increasing Degree Attainment among Low-Income Students: The Role of Intensive Advising and College Quality” appears in the November 2025 issue of the American Economic Review.