This dissertation is a collection of three studies investigating students' postsecondary decision making process. Using qualitative data from 93 semi-structured interviews with high school seniors from seven low-income rural and urban high schools in a Midwestern state, along with survey data from qualitative sample as well as the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), this study examines the role that family, peers, school, and personal characteristics play in shaping students' college match.Chapter 1 explores the role of noncognitive skills in students' decision to match. Using qualitative data from 63 seniors from the graduating class of 2013, I probe the construct of "college material", finding that students have internalized the message about college-for-all, and have consequently determined that traditional college readiness indicators such as academic ability are not what makes someone college material. Instead, students associate noncognitive skills such as grit and self-efficacy with college success, revealing differences between matched and undermatched students. While matched students are able to articulate that they have these noncognitive traits, undermatched students have vaguer notions of these characteristics. In the subsequent quantitative analysis with ELS, I find that noncognitive skills offer little explanatory power in directly determining undermatch. Instead it appears that they serve a mediating role with the number of college applications that students submit. Additionally, the importance of students' help-seeking emerges as a key predictor of application behavior. Chapter 2 examines the role of parental involvement, using the full qualitative dataset and developing a matrix of parental involvement by parental education. Focusing on the students with highly involved parents, I select six students to profile more deeply, with data from both initial and follow-up interviews with the 2012 and 2013 seniors. I find that students with less educated parents had developed academically-oriented college-going identities which differentiated them from their peers early on. These students utilized school and sibling support to identify good college options and pursue them. Students whose parents had some college education were more influenced by their parents to attend college. Students whose parents had attained at least a BA degree were heavily dependent on their parents for college guidance and support. This analysis provides additional insight into so-called "helicopter parents" and their prevalence and role within low-income households.Chapter 3 considers the family, school, and peer influences together, recognizing that students are nested in their social contexts, and are subject to the norms and values within. Using the qualitative data from the 2013 senior cohort, I explore the messages that students received from their families, schools, and peers. These data suggest that peers play a significant role in students' postsecondary decision making. Norms established among peer groups can serve to support or undermine students' match, as it takes significant support either from home or school to help a student resist the pressure to conform to peer college choices. Particularly among rural students, the strength of peer norm influence around college-going is comparable to that of home and school. The paper then builds a structural equation model comparing the influence of family, school, peer influence, help-seeking behavior, and academic performance constructs on undermatch. Comparing this model across subgroups, this analysis indicates that these relationships are raced and classed, but apparently not gendered.
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