Bright but Poor: Undermatching in the Access to Postsecondary Education

Undermatching identifies high school graduates who do not attend selective colleges even if they have high academic performance. To date, the study of undermatching is restricted to access to selective colleges and to the United States and the United Kingdom. We expand this concept to identify students who, having high academic performance, do not undertake five critical educational transitions: graduating from high school, enrolling in higher education, taking the college-entry exam, enrolling in university, and enrolling in a selective university. Using the case of Chile and a novel population-level panel dataset combining administrative and survey data, we found that undermatching is prevalent, highly stratified by socioeconomic status, and stronger among disadvantaged boys than girls. A Gelbach decomposition analysis suggested that inequality in undermatching is largely accounted for by the students’ sorting across schools. We discuss the implications of undermatching for countries around the world.