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A paper
Changing College Choices with Personalized Admissions
Information at Scale: Evidence on Naviance
Christine Mulhern
Harvard University
April 2019
Abstract
Choosing where to apply to college is a complex problem with long-term
consequences, but many students lack the guidance necessary to make
optimal choices. I show that a technology which provides low-cost
personalized college admissions information to over forty percent of
high schoolers significantly alters college choices. Students shift
applications and attendance to colleges for which they can observe
information on schoolmates’ admissions experiences. Responses are
largest when such information suggests a high admissions probability.
Disadvantaged students respond the most, and information on in-state
colleges increases their fouryear college attendance. Data features
and framing, however, deter students from selective colleges.

is discussed in a Wall Street Journal article

The Online Tool That Helps—and Hinders?—College Applicants
Students who use Naviance are more likely to be accepted where they apply—but may be deterred from reaching for highly selective schools
By Jo Craven McGinty
May 3, 2019

...

students who were just below the average GPA of a highly selective college were 15% less likely to apply than students just above the average, even though they should have similar admissions probabilities.

The pattern suggests students may avoid applying to colleges if they fear they won’t get in. That might improve admissions outcomes, but it also may discourage students from applying to the best colleges they are qualified to attend.

Naviance points out that scattergrams are just one of the platform’s tools.

“Scattergrams are an important piece of the puzzle, but they’re just one data input,” said Kim Oppelt, director of research at Hobsons Inc., Naviance’s parent company. “We really have made a big effort to call out what’s most important” in profiles that outline affordability, graduation rates and other details for each college in Naviance’s catalog.

Still, Ms. Mulhern found that high-school students were 20% more likely to apply to schools whose admissions results were portrayed in scattergrams.

She examined the college choices of students in a mid-Atlantic school district with 10 to 15 high schools and approximately 4,000 graduates a year during the first three years the students could access Naviance. (Schools that have used the platform for longer will have more robust data.) The average student logged onto the platform 43 times during high school and 23 times in 12th grade alone.

Once students had access to the scattergrams, fewer applied to reach colleges and more attended safety schools—schools where they were likely to be admitted but also where their achievements exceeded the majority of other students who were accepted there.

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Naviance is a useful tool, but high school students should consider colleges that do not have Naviance data.

has anyone done a study that if your grades are slightly on the lower side for top schools, so you go to a state school, are the undergrad grades better and therefore get into a better grad school?

I would think that would be the case. Many of DD's classmates in the lower grade point are switching back to easier schools. They will have a better grade average to apply to colleges in Canada, which are totally merit based. Although some have high school profiles so that a 90 at one school maybe equivalent to a 98 at another.

So if you cannot get into a Yale, or would be in the bottom half of the class, is it better to go to Penn State Honors and be in the top 10% and apply to graduate school? Does anyone know?

How do they evaluate when on grad applications, because you still do the GRE, MCAT or whatever.

Grading may be easier at private schools on average:

Want a Higher G.P.A.? Go to a Private College
BY CATHERINE RAMPELL
New York Times
APRIL 19, 2010

Over the last 50 years, college grade-point averages have risen about 0.1 points per decade, with private schools fueling the most grade inflation, a recent study finds.

The study, by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, uses historical data from 80 four-year colleges and universities. It finds that G.P.A.’s have risen from a national average of 2.52 in the 1950s to about 3.11 by the middle of the last decade.

For the first half of the 20th century, grading at private schools and public schools rose more or less in tandem. But starting in the 1950s, grading at public and private schools began to diverge. Students at private schools started receiving significantly higher grades than those received by their equally-qualified peers — based on SAT scores and other measures — at public schools.

...

This article was from 2014 NYT
Why You Can’t Catch Up
By Nancy Hass
Aug. 1, 2014

College counselors have used this chestnut to assuage ambitious, cash-strapped students for decades: Don’t worry about attending a top college. What matters is where you go to graduate school. A stellar master’s degree can “scrub” an undergraduate diploma from a less prestigious, and more affordable, institution.

“I’ve always been told, and I tell the kids, that your career and salary aren’t really affected by where you wind up at college, and anyway, you can go to a better graduate school,” said Carla Shere, who, in addition to counseling private clients, is director of college planning for Humanities Preparatory Academy, a progressive public high school in Manhattan.

Unfortunately, that consoling bit of advice is wrong, according to Joni Hersch, a Vanderbilt University economics and law professor.

It is extremely difficult for students from less competitive colleges to gain admission to top graduate programs, including law and business schools, regardless of how good their grades and scores are. And those who do rarely attain the earnings power of peers who attended elite colleges. “The myth is that there are lots of entry points in the system, ways for people to rise up, to climb the educational ladder, but the numbers tell a different story,” Dr. Hersch said.

For her working paper “Catching Up Is Hard to Do: Undergraduate Prestige, Elite Graduate Programs and the Earnings Premium,” Dr. Hersch used data from the National Survey of College Graduates to analyze the long-term income of graduates with master’s and professional degrees and Ph.D.s. She assigned tiers based on institution type according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and Barron’s college rankings. Graduates were separated into those who had earned their undergraduate degrees from lower-prestige colleges, referred to as Tier 4 (nearly 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees come from such schools), and those who went to more competitive institutions.
Tier 1 consists of major private research institutions like Yale, Johns Hopkins and New York University. Tier 2 schools are selective private liberal arts colleges like Middlebury and Vassar. Tier 3 are major public research universities, among them most of the University of California system. The remainder — less research intensive and selective, like Middle Tennessee State, Golden Gate University or the for-profit Grand Canyon University — fall into Tier 4.

While nearly a third of students from Tier 4 schools go on to earn a graduate degree, only 7 percent of them do so at a Tier 1 school; 66 percent remain in a Tier 4 program. This is significant because higher-tier schools provide graduate students with better training, facilities, funding and access to job recruiters.

The news is discouraging even for the tiny cohort who get into higher-tier grad schools. Regardless of the sheen on their new credential, their earnings never catch up. While a male graduate of a Tier 1 college with a graduate degree from a Tier 1 to 3 school earns on average $185,695 a year, a Tier 4 college graduate with a higher-tier graduate degree earns only $133,236. The gap for women is even more striking: A Tier 4 college graduate who attended a higher-tier law school, for example, earns about 60 percent of the salary of a lawyer with a B.A. from a Tier 1 college.

There was more that I missed:
The reasons for the disparity are easy to track, said Christopher Avery, a professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who has written extensively on college as an agent of social mobility. Students who earn a degree from an elite college, even those with unimpressive grades and test scores, are simply too far ahead of those who don’t, he said.

Even though some elite institutions are using their vast resources to recruit low-income applicants, a majority of their students come from well-off backgrounds. Tier 1 and 2 graduates are about twice as likely to have parents who graduated from college than students who went to Tier 4 institutions. Their children are instructed from a young age not only in academics but also in the social nuances of making contacts and building relationships.

Tier 4 schools have fewer resources for research and opportunities for undergraduates to take advanced courses and find mentors. With graduation rates below 50 percent at many such institutions, there is little chance to create useful social networks.

“What’s disturbing about this research is that it shows that even if you distinguish yourself as a great student at a Tier 4 school, and by some miracle you get into a good grad program, you aren’t likely to wind up with the tools you need to ever catch up to those people who went to a more selective four-year college,” Dr. Avery said. “You want to think that at some point the playing field is level, but the truth is increasingly clear that the answer is it probably never is. By high school, it’s pretty much over.”

This obsession with GPA both in HS and UG is insane.

It is one of the reasons why kids these days in HS are under so much pressure - instead of just enjoying their childhoods and then rocking the finals/SATs/ACTs/IBs/AP exams, they have to 24x7 have their noses hard to the grindstone on busywork to keep their GPAs up.

For UG school it has become so absurd that I have seen several posts where Caltech graduates telling potential applicants not to bother if they plan on attending medical school. Because Caltech is one of the last bastions of academic rigor and honesty it is notoriously hard have a decent 3.9+ GPA. This puts medical schools off apparently. I would have expected medical schools to just look at the MCAT scores but NOOOOOO...

I think that the focus on GPA is how the achievement gap between males and females is being reconciled.

And by achievement gap, I mean lifetime achievement gap.

What strikes me in this post is... it's not the college. Family life matters:

Here women do better at high school and more women attend university but women still get paid less. Internal assessment (simulate to maintaining GPA) favours girls as they tend to be more keen on pleasing the teacher, more disciplined and have better executive function. Somehow though that doesn't make them top paid explorers.

top paid explorers are usually high risk takers. Woman usually do not score well on risk. I know this since I took the test and scored off the chart on risk, but married a physician, who usually are low risk. Women are now more than 50% of the slots in medical school.