During the transition period between the use of exclusively old SAT® scores and the use of exclusively new SAT scores, college admission offices will be receiving both types of scores from students. Making an admission decision based on new SAT scores can be challenging at first because institutions have methods, procedures, and models based on…

We use statewide administrative data from Missouri to examine the role of high schools in explaining students' initial college and major placements at 4-year public universities. To facilitate our investigation of postsecondary sorting, we develop a "preparation and persistence index" (PPI) for each university-by-major cell in the…

We derived an index of high school academic rigor by optimizing the prediction of first-year college GPA based on high school courses taken, grades, and indicators of advanced coursework. Using a large data set (n~108,000) and nominal parameterization of high school course outcomes, the high school academic rigor (HSAR) index capitalizes on…