About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.

Wow, that is an insanely large discrepancy. As for undermatching, part of that might have to do with application fees. If it's costing you $50/application and you want to apply to ten places, chances are you're going to apply to places with a better chance of accepting you. A lot of the time you can get that fee waived, but many people don't know that or how to do it.

This gets touched upon, but I really think that culture shock and the adjustment to college are the two key things here. If you have parents or other family members with college experience you should have a clearer picture of what to expect, and how to handle things.

And so when they experienced cues that might suggest that they weren’t smart or academically able...

It took me a long to figure out how to deal with failing grades, since I never had any before college. Eventually I got to the point where I just accepted that it might happen on tests or homeworks, and not to worry about it. This also effected my study habits, and for the better. Everybody figures these things out in their own way, and it's the journey of getting there that matters.

Now that I think about it, some of these things were kind of in place my Freshman year. We had a 10-week long course that was essentially "college-101" that met once a week and involved a lot of reflection. Short essays about what we expect over the next x years, what we've been involved with thus far, and in order to pass the course you had one 30 minute long meeting with the professor the course. Good guy, older, soft-spoken professor who played the banjo.

I guess the fact that I remember that almost 4 years later means it had some effect.