Selective College Admissions Research Articles

The role of letters of recommendation in perpetuating or challenging the social stratification of American secondary schools: a quantitative analysis of admission officer assessments in highly selective college admission

Admission to highly selective institutions offers a pathway to upward social mobility, particularly for low-resource students. However, entrenched wealth disparities in the United States present serious challenges for admission officers at highly selective institutions. Utilizing individualized holistic review (IHR), including letters of recommendation (LOR), and contextual consideration, highly selective institutions aim to account for wealth inequities. This quantitative analysis, conducted at a highly selective research university, examined 95,326 applicants across 4 years to explore if admission officers’ internal assessments of LORs relate to contextual independent variables beyond students’ control. Statistical methods, including ANOVA, Two-Way ANOVA, Chi-Square, multiple linear regression, and logistic regression, were employed, controlling for standard measures of academic readiness. Findings revealed higher LOR assessments for students facing greater contextual challenge levels, underscoring the ability of the admission process to identify high achieving students from high challenge contexts. Paradoxically, elevated LOR ratings were also observed for students from private and smaller schools, indicating a nuanced interplay of factors in the admission process. Importantly, LOR assessments significantly correlated with admission outcomes, emphasizing the pivotal role of LORs in highly selective college admissions. This study reveals the nuanced role of LORs in admissions, exposing their potential to tackle inequities. It calls for improved IHR training and heightened consideration of contextual variables, offering a crucial contribution to advancing equity in highly selective institutions, fostering more informed admission practices.

Translating Authentic Selves into Authentic Applications: Private College Consulting and Selective College Admissions

Stratification in selective college admissions persists even as colleges’ criteria for evaluating merit have multiplied in efforts to increase socioeconomic and racial diversity. Middle-class and affluent families increasingly turn to privatized services, such as private college consulting, to navigate what they perceive to be a complicated and opaque application process. How independent educational consultants (IECs) advise students can thus serve as a lens for understanding how the rules of college admissions are interpreted and taught to students. Through 50 in-depth interviews with IECs, I find that IECs encourage students to be authentic by being true to themselves but that demonstrating authenticity requires attention to how one’s authentic self will be perceived. Translating an authentic self into an authentic application also involves class-based and racialized considerations, particularly for Asian American students who are susceptible to being stereotyped as inauthentic. These findings suggest that efforts to improve diversity must be carefully implemented, or they risk reproducing inequality.

Assessing applicants in context? School profiles and their implications for equity in the selective college admission process.

Assessing applicants in context? School profiles and their implications for equity in the selective college admission process.

Divergent Approaches to Access: How Selective College Admissions Offices Recruit Lower-Income, First-Generation, and Working-Class Students

In recent years, selective colleges and universities have made diversifying their student bodies a top priority, yet the class diversity on these campuses has barely shifted. While most research on class disparities in college admissions focuses on student explanations, this study seeks to understand how campus admissions approaches to recruitment may also contribute to why so few lower-income, first-generation, and/or working-class students (LIFGWC students) attend selective colleges. To address this question, we conducted interviews with seven admissions officers from selective campuses with both relatively strong and weak records of LIFGWC students recruitment. Institutions with stronger records of recruiting LIFGWC students actively sought out new initiatives to make their college more accessible for LIFGWC students, and these actions were motivated by a shared focus on improving larger societal inequality. Although campuses with weaker records also expanded their recruitment strategies, their efforts were often piecemeal and motivated by competition for students and institutional rankings rather than a larger mission to improve diversity and equity. These findings suggest that institutional missions and philosophies are central to increasing access.

The Personal Statement as a Marginalizing Rhetorical Device: Merit and Racism in College Access

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in; font-size: medium; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;, serif;">This paper is a literature review on the personal statement, merit, race, and racism through the application of colorblind and race-neutral policies. In an attempt to avoid racist admission policies, higher education place overwhelming emphasis on objective merits, such as grades. However, during the personal statement writing process, minoritized applicants’ expression of merit may be affected by racial inequities, experiences, and educational preparation, both consciously and unconsciously. Therefore, by excluding race, colorblind merit policies may contribute to unexpected and unintentional racism in admissions. In this paper, college-choice theory (CCT), critical race theory (CRT), and critical literacy theory (CLT) are used to interrogate colorblind merit in higher education to suggest why race is an important feature of applicants’ narratives in the personal statement context. If race is significant to applicants’ identities, then their narratives would be incomplete without it. There is a need to centralize both merit and race in personal statement research to allow education professionals to appropriately assess applicants’ statements. Reintegrating race in assessments could improve our understanding of selective college admission processes and inform recommendations to refine instruction and evaluation of applicants’ personal statement writing.&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span>

The Role of Selective College Admissions Criteria in Interrupting or Reproducing Racial and Economic Inequities

ABSTRACT Selective colleges have increasingly considered a variety of factors, such as academic rigor, extracurriculars, essays, interviews, recommendations, and background characteristics, alongside traditional academic factors in determining who is admitted. These efforts have been hailed as a strategy to expand access to selective higher education for talented students from racially and economically marginalized backgrounds. But such efforts introduce ambiguous admissions criteria—excellence in extracurriculars, subjective assessments of character and talent gleaned from essays, interviews, and recommendations—that may favor students from socially privileged families. We draw on nearly a decade of data on selective college admissions processes to examine how the importance of various admissions criteria relate to enrollment among racially and economically marginalized students. Using panel data from 2008 to 2016 and random effects analyses, our findings indicate ambiguous criteria that often comprise a more comprehensive approach to admissions may do little to ameliorate—and in some cases, may exacerbate—existing enrollment inequities. We also find that moving away from test scores and focusing on academic rigor represent potentially promising strategies for expanding access at some institutions.

What are We Talking About When We Talk About Holistic Review? Selective College Admissions and its Effects on Low-SES Students

ABSTRACTThis mixed-methods study used open-response survey data, focus groups, and an experimental simulation to explore how 311 admissions officers defined and used concepts of holistic review in selective college admissions. We found that 3 distinct definitions of holistic review predominate in the field: whole file, whole person, and whole context. We explored these concepts qualitatively and used the coded data to predict decision making in an experimental simulation. We found that admissions officers with a “whole context” view of holistic review were disproportionately likely to admit a low socioeconomic-status applicant in our simulation. Inconsistent definitions of a core admissions concept make it more difficult for the public to comprehend the “black box” of college admissions, and a more consistently contextualized view of holistic review may also have real-world implications for the representation of low-income students at selective colleges.

Advanced Placement and Rural Schools

Completing Advanced Placement (AP) coursework is an important part of the selective college admissions process, and access to AP coursework can be viewed as a measure of equal opportunity. Relatively little research has fully examined how access to AP coursework is mediated by school characteristics. Rural schools are at a particular disadvantage in promoting AP success due to a lack of sufficiently prepared students, teaching constraints, and other logistical challenges. This study uses regression to analyze AP access, enrollment, and success across a rich data set of U.S. school districts. We find that remote, small, and poor rural schools are considerably less likely to offer any AP courses. Even for rural schools that do offer AP coursework, enrollment and success rates lag well behind more urban and affluent schools. We explore potential policy solutions and examine alternative advanced coursework options for those rural schools that do not offer AP.

Campus Strategic Action in the Fisher Case: Organizational Stakeholder Advocacy Across the Field of Higher Education

Using a census sampling, this analysis evaluates the campus structures and practices that are predictive of a campus being affiliated with stakeholder legal advocacy regarding the Fisher Supreme Court affirmative action case of 2013. Findings reveal that a campus utilizing selective admissions operated as a sufficient, but not a necessary, requirement to prompt stakeholders to take a legal position in the case. Also, campuses that enrolled and graduated the largest percentages of nonwhite students were inclined to have stakeholders submit amicus briefs advocating support for UT-Austin and the use of race in selective college admissions.

Mismatch and the Paternalistic Justification for Selective College Admissions

Although some scholars report that all students are better served by attending more prestigious postsecondary institutions, others have argued that students are better off attending colleges where they are about average in terms of academic ability and suffer worse outcomes if they attend schools that are “out of their league” at which they are “overmatched.” The latter argument is most frequently deployed as a paternalistic justification for ending affirmative action. We take advantage of a natural admissions experiment at the University of California to test the effect of being overmatched for students on the margin of admission to elite universities. Consistent with the mismatch hypothesis, we find that students accumulate more credits when they attend less demanding institutions. However, students do not earn higher grades and are no more or less likely to drop out of schools where they are overmatched and are less likely to drop out than they would have been had they attended less demanding institutions.

Running in Place: Low-Income Students and the Dynamics of Higher Education Stratification

The increasing concentration of wealthy students at highly selective colleges is widely perceived, but few analyses examine the underlying dynamics of higher education stratification over time. To examine these dynamics, the authors build an analysis data set of four cohorts from 1972 to 2004. They find that low-income students have made substantial gains in their academic course achievements since the 1970s. Nonetheless, wealthier students have made even stronger gains in achievement over the same period, in both courses and test scores, ensuring a competitive advantage in the market for selective college admissions. Thus, even if low-income students were “perfectly matched” to institutions consistent with their academic achievements, the stratification order would remain largely unchanged. The authors consider organizational and policy interventions that may reverse these trends.

Merit and Competition in Selective College Admissions

Using interview data from 34 admissions officers at 17 elite colleges, this paper compares two perspectives shaping admissions policy. Admissions officers apply a “merit” perspective that relies on indicators of student academic and nonacademic achievement. They also employ a “competition” perspective that evaluates student characteristics according to organizational needs. Findings include (a) elite colleges’ maintenance of an illusion that student achievement determines admissions, and (b) that admissions practices are designed to maintain the colleges’ elite status.

Access and Excess: Selective College Admissions in Historical Perspective

(2008). Access and Excess: Selective College Admissions in Historical Perspective. The Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 79, No. 1, pp. 113-123.

Why and how socioeconomic factors should be used in selective college admissions

AbstractThis chapter describes and discusses the socioeconomic factors pressing for consideration in selective college admission policies and processes. It also presents an institutional example of using socioeconomic factors in a selective college admission process.

Identifying a diverse student body: Selective college admissions and alternative approaches

AbstractThis chapter explores alternative solutions for selective institutions of higher education to reach beyond their traditional admission measures and identify diverse students who might otherwise not be selected by traditional admission criteria.

Making SAT scores optional in selective college admissions: a case study

Despite heightened scrutiny of the use of standardized tests in college admissions, there has been little public empirical analysis of the effects of an optional SAT score submission policy on college admissions. This paper examines the results of the decision by Mount Holyoke College to make SAT scores optional in the admissions process. We find that students who “under-performed” on the SAT relative to their high school GPA were more likely to withhold their scores; the admissions office rated applicants who withheld their scores more highly than they otherwise would have been rated; and, matriculants who withheld their scores had a lower average GPA than those who submitted their standardized test results.

An Opinion of the State Education Commission on the Experimental Implementation of the General Upper Middle School Graduation Examination System

I. The general upper middle school graduation examination is a province-level examination ratified and endorsed by the state. It will be an examination of levels and, as such, is fundamentally different in nature from the selective college and university admission examinations. The middle school graduation examination is a means to examine and evaluate the quality of teaching and learning at the upper middle school stage and to check whether the learning of upper middle school graduates in the academic subjects is of passable standards. The implementation of this general examination system must be predicated on its being conducive to facilitating an across-the-board implementation of the guidelines of education in general, to promoting pedagogical reform at the upper middle school level, to strengthening the management of teaching, and to enhancing its quality.

The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America

The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America

The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America

The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America

The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America

The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America