Most students begin their college search on Google. A quick query of “colleges” returns a mix of AI summaries, sponsored results from for-profit institutions, organic results from public and nonprofit institutions, and rankings from sources like U.S. News & World Report, usually tailored to a student’s location.
This might seem like an innocuous, even democratic, process for students working toward earning a college degree. For a student without a designated college counselor, connections to lean on, or the money for campus tours, the search bar should be a way to reach the same options as everyone else. But new research from sociologists at Northwestern University finds it works the other way: On average, Google returns lower-quality college results for students from lower-income zip codes.
Dr. Lincoln Quillian and Carson Phillips of Northwestern University partnered with OxyLabs, a leading web intelligence collection company, to scrape Google search results in every zip code in the U.S. with more than 100 residents for college-related search terms over eight weeks in December 2023 and January 2024. After simulating searches in nearly every zip code in the country, they cross-referenced the results with census data from each area.
Using completion rate, loan default rate, median earnings, and mobility rates to evaluate each institution, they determined that affluent students are up to three times more likely than their nonaffluent counterparts to see results from the colleges with the best postgraduate outcomes.
Based on the same metrics, the researchers sorted colleges into four clusters: good outcomes (top 25 percent of institutions), high mobility, fair outcomes, and poor outcomes. On average, students from lower-income zip codes received fair to poor results from the same non-sponsored Google searches. When the researchers tested the experiment again in 2025 using Google’s new AI summaries, they found similar results. Students from denser, urban zip codes also see better results than students from more rural zip codes, particularly if there are other affluent zip codes nearby.
“Search shows people results that are locally-relevant—whether that’s a nearby business or a college—but our search systems don’t personalize results in this way based on inferred income levels,” a Google spokesperson wrote by email in response to a request for comment. The Northwestern researchers say that while geography accounts for 40 to 80 percent of the trends they saw in search results, there is a remaining portion that appears to be based on other indicators: The algorithm also factors in click rates, personal data, and ad targeting paid for by the institutions themselves, the researchers told me.
“Information that’s linked to opportunities is being distributed through these searches in a way that’s very unequal across areas, and it sometimes seems very perverse in its implications,” Dr. Quillian told me. “Especially for high-achieving students in low-income zip codes, it seems like it’s providing results that often are leading them toward bad choices.” Students from affluent zip codes were more likely to see results for colleges that scored well on the national Mobility Report Cards calculated by Opportunity Insights, despite the fact that those colleges actually do admit and award financial aid to a lot of lower-income students.
Factoring in financial aid, selective institutions typically cost lower-income students less than nonselective two-year and four-year institutions, researchers from Stanford and Harvard found in 2013. But because of geographic barriers in the admissions and recruiting process, many students and families never learn about such opportunities. Experts call this “undermatching,” which existed before online searches became the primary method of college discovery. “These students were really consistently getting undermatched before AI and other online tools even existed,” Laurie Jammal, a college counselor at Edison High School in New Jersey, told me. “So it’s like the algorithm is doing the same thing that society was before.”
Access to college counseling can change the game for students, particularly at a public school like Edison. High school juniors who speak one-on-one with a college counselor are 3.2 times more likely to attend college and 6.8 times more likely to complete a Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. But Jammal said the pandemic significantly disrupted her ability to reach students, even through online tools. She has tried using Instagram, Twitter, Google Classroom, and email lists, but she continues to see students, who already feel inundated with information, slip through the cracks.
“They’re definitely taking things into their own hands, and they think that their Google search is going to be more tailored to them than what I’m going to say,” Jammal said.
In reality, according to the Northwestern study, Google searches from low-income zip codes yield more results from for-profit institutions, which are more likely to put students in debt and leave them without any transferable credits if they want to switch programs or, in the worst case, their institution shuts down. Of the nearly 300 colleges and universities that closed between 2008 and 2023, more than 60 percent were run by for-profit operators, according to The Hechinger Report.
The Northwestern researchers also found that low-income students were more likely to see schools that have bad returns or even been found liable in court for using misleading marketing practices. For example, schools with “poor outcomes” dominated 30 percent of results for students with annual household incomes of $50,000, while taking up less than 10 percent of results for students with household incomes above $150,000.
For-profit institutions are more likely to engage in advertising practices that push their websites to the top, according to a GAO investigation. And for students who don’t have as many resources to help them with the search, it can be easy to fall prey to colleges that boast they can “earn your credential in two years” or “get your degree from home” before saddling those students with thousands of dollars of debt.
Google isn’t the only culprit. A 2024 study by researchers at Princeton and
the University of Southern California found that Meta’s algorithm was more likely to show Black users ads from “predatory” for-profit colleges. (Representatives at Meta did not respond to a request for comment.)
Most accreditation removal cases have gone after for-profit institutions for their use of in-person recruitment methods like college fairs, and even then, studies have shown that accreditation agencies often wait too long to prosecute this kind of fraudulent behavior. The Trump administration has made efforts to crack down on colleges that generate negative returns on investment, but it has yet to scrutinize the online advertisement methods they use to lure students.
More than half of students with strong academic credentials from low-income families never apply to a competitive college, even though many would have a good chance of getting in. Students who grow up the least likely to graduate from college end up seeing the greatest returns from attaining degrees, including less poverty, more time married, and greater civic engagement. But the biggest search engine in the country is further hindering access to a quality college education for students who stand to benefit the most. “We could use more folks from low-income backgrounds who could help shape our institutions and countries, and it’s putting them on a path away from that,” Quillian said. “So that’s definitely troubling.”
