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Abstract
There is substantial evidence of the relationship between household income and achievement on the standardized tests often required for college admissions, yet little comparable inquiry considers the essays typically required of applicants to selective U.S. colleges and universities. We used a corpus of 240,000 admission essays submitted by 60,000 applicants to the University of California in November 2016 to measure relationships between the content of admission essays, self-reported household income, and SAT scores. We quantified essay content using correlated topic modeling and essay style using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We found that essay content and style had stronger correlations to self-reported household income than did SAT scores and that essays explained much of the variance in SAT scores. This analysis shows that essays encode similar information as the SAT and suggests that college admission protocols should attend to how social class is encoded in non-numerical components of applications.
Highlights
The information selective colleges and universities use when evaluating applicants has been a perennial ethical and policy concern in the United States
On the basis of this finding, we argue that essay content and style are far more predictive of SAT score than, for example, high school grade point average (GPA) [R2 = 0.04 between high school GPA and total SAT score [29], those results were based on an older version of the SAT and might not be fully comparable with the results reported here]
We have shown that essay content and style are associated with SAT score; this relationship may be partially due to the fact that both SAT score and essay content and style are associated with income
Summary
The information selective colleges and universities (defined by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as schools that deny admission to at least 20% of applicants) use when evaluating applicants has been a perennial ethical and policy concern in the United States. Admission officers have made use of scores on standardized tests (SAT in particular) to assess and compare applicants. Proponents of standardized tests have argued that they enable universal and unbiased measures of academic aptitude and may have salutary effects on fairness in evaluation when used as universal screens [1,2,3,4]; critics have noted the large body of evidence indicating a strong correlation between SAT scores and socioeconomic background, with some having dubbed the SAT a “wealth test” [5, 6]. If at all, do admission essays correlate with household income and SAT scores? If at all, do admission essays correlate with household income and SAT scores? Advances in machine learning have made it possible to analyze personal statements and other historically less quantifiable components of admission files at scale
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