Direct Admissions is a system developed and piloted recently in the US that defaults graduating high school students into post-secondary admittance by data-matching their profiles (transcripts, standardized test scores, and prerequisites) with institutions' preset eligibility criteria. As applicant and institutional interest in direct admissions…

English university admissions increasingly make use of contextual offers, where applicants with certain socio-demographic characteristics can be offered marginally lower entry conditions. This paper presents novel insights on the impact of contextual offer policy on one institutions' patterns of enrolment in 2022/23 via a mixed methods…

Extensive literature has compared the effect of selective schools with that of non-selective schools on pupil outcomes in England. However, evaluation of selective systems has been sparse and contradictory. From the perspective of educational equity, this study assesses the potential impact of academically selective school systems on pupils'…

Some universities, often the most prestigious in a higher education system, select qualified applicants solely on the basis of their measured academic or cognitive abilities. The universities' assumption is that these cognitive abilities are an accurate and complete measure of the applicants' capacity to benefit from university study. This study…

In England, students apply to universities using teacher-predicted grades instead of their final end-of-school A-level examination results. Predicted rather than achieved grades therefore determine how ambitiously students apply to and receive offers from the most selective courses. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS)…

Well-designed admission criteria can predict the likelihood of students succeeding in the medical program. This study aims to evaluate the predictive capability of the admission qualifications used in the Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila (PLM) College of Medicine concerning the academic performance of first-year medical students. Data from 1,203…

Individuals released from prison often struggle to begin their lives again. Finding employment and acceptable housing may be at the top of their To Do lists but the list of requirements may not stop there. Hefty fines or rigorous probation requirements are often part of one's reentry experience. Others may wish to seek training or educational…

An increasing number of all undergraduate students are attending more than one university in their path toward earning a four-year college degree. With a national push toward free and accessible community college and the rising cost of higher education in general, more and more students are transferring between institutions. As a result, four-year…

This study investigates current practices in how admissions policies are communicated through student-facing web pages. One hundred fifty web pages (30 institutions, 5 admissions web pages each, stratified by degree-level and major) were scraped for information about holistic admissions policies and required application materials. Overall, more…

For the past decade and a half, many institutions of higher education have asked about high school disciplinary experiences, including suspensions, on their applications. Advocates have argued that this "discipline box" has a negative effect on suspended students' likelihood to apply and be accepted to institutions of higher education…

In common with many other higher tariff universities in the United Kingdom, Durham University uses contextual data about the socio-economic circumstances of applicants to inform decisions about whom to admit to its undergraduate degree programmes. This paper draws on data for undergraduates who entered Durham University in the period 2018-2020 (N…

This study examines the extent to which school choice in the Toronto Catholic District School Board impacts equity and segregation. This examination is important because full public funding for the Board should adhere to the goals of public education, namely, equity and inclusion of all students. A critical policy geography perspective is applied…

In undergraduate sign language interpreter education in the United States, scholars have observed a lack of standardization among programs of the same academic level and called for greater definition of the differences between academic levels. This study sought to quantify programs' degree of standardization within and differentiation between…

This paper explores the relationship between admission criteria and college major selection among 1,595 undergraduate students at King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences (KSAUHS) in Saudi Arabia. The study examines how the admission criteria--high school GPA, General Aptitude Test (GAT), Scholastic Achievement Admission Test (SAAT),…

The goal of this study was to assess the outcomes of a grant-funded intervention designed to provide comprehensive training and support for holistic admissions in 26 STEM PhD programs at five California research universities. This pilot intervention combined a flexible, research-based model of holistic review, training for faculty involved with…