Review of "Overcoming the Odds: The Benefits of Completing College for Unlikely Graduates", by Jennie E. Brand. Social Forces 103, no. 2 (2024): e1-e2. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/941801. 

In Overcoming the Odds, Brand conclusively demonstrates the value of college completion for those students who are least likely to attend. Through an innovative method of propensity matching, she is able to confirm that college completion benefits these students in a variety of ways, reducing chances of poverty, unemployment, low-wage work, and job instability and providing some civic benefits as well in terms of greater volunteering and political participation. Brand has spent years working in this area, publishing high quality articles about social mobility and education. She uses that wealth of knowledge here. The book's message is a welcome addition to the public policy discussion about the value of public funding for higher education.

That message, that college does good things and that its impact is greatest for those students least likely to attend (which includes first-generation college students but also students with lower test scores, two groups that are not identical but that conceptually get blurred a bit in this text), is breathtakingly simple and one wonders about all the effort taken to establish it. Brand at times seems to be combatting a particular straw man, one I imagine sitting in a comfortable armchair in a tweed coat disparaging poor students who are taking up space in college without doing themselves much good. Brand asserts that the "veiled rhetoric about 'low-achieving' students often suggests limiting enrollment for students from low-income families and students of color" (pg. 3). I have never run into this particular straw man, but perhaps Brand has. This is not an argument I often hear in the world of public universities, keen to increase enrollment and improve outcomes for first-generation college students.

What I have heard said, and what I myself have sometimes said, is that a "college for all" mission can have some unintended negative consequences, both on people who do not go to college and on college graduates who compete against each other in a crowded job market. Throw in dwindling public support for subsidizing higher education and rising tuitions at all kinds of colleges, public and private, and you have some real structural problems whose worst effects are often felt by first-generation and working-class students. These are the students most likely to take on debt to attend college and those least likely to have parents who can help them effectively translate their college degrees into middle-class careers. They are also the students who struggle with feelings of guilt for leaving their families and communities, impostor syndrome, alienation, and the overall burden of academic success.

But none of those problems are acknowledged by Brand, whose single-minded focus on the payoff of college is both the book's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Perhaps the biggest advance is methodological. She capably walks the reader through propensity matching analyses and how they can resolve some of the stickier problems in addressing whether or not college is worth it for all students, not just those who are likely to succeed anyway. Because her focus is on fairly straightforward and measurable indicators of success, she is able to demonstrate that it is. All things equal, if you take two people who are similarly placed in terms of background and ability, the one who goes to college is less likely to experience poverty, less likely to face unemployment and job instability, less likely to work in a low-pay job, and more likely to volunteer and vote than the person who does not go to college.

Each of these outcomes receives its own chapter in the book, with abundant bar and line graphs that make it relatively easy to follow the analyses, even for those who are not trained in quantitative methods. In each she makes the point that the difference in positive outcomes between those who go to college and... [read more