Match, Mismatch, and What to Do About Diversity

Common adage: stay in your lane. Common result: students attend colleges that are equivalent in prestige to their own records, as judged by a comparison of the student’s percentile rank (computed from GPA and test scores) with the percentile rank of the college. So, if a student ranks in the 30th percentile of their cohort, they might be advised to attend a college that ranks at about the 30th percentile compared to other schools to which students might apply. A difference of greater than +/−20 percentile points between the student’s percentile ranking and that of the college constitutes a form of what is called a mismatch.