Admission systems play a critical role in shaping educational opportunities by determining what choices are available to whom. Policy makers and institutions must balance multiple, often conflicting, goals which requires trade-offs between competing values. In this paper, we present core values for admission to higher education alongside a novel…

Drawing on higher education regionalism, this paper explores international branch campus (IBC) initiatives undertaken by one of the largest Russian IBC-exporting institutions, the Lomonosov Moscow State University (LMSU). To date, very little is known about higher education (HE) export-import between the post-Soviet countries. This qualitative…

In the 1930s, American colleges and universities began to screen applications using the SAT, a mass-administered, IQ-descended standardized test. The widespread adoption of the test accompanied the development of the world's first mass higher education system--and served to promote the idea that the United States was becoming a…

A major admissions reform was carried out in Finnish higher education at the end of the last decade. This paper focuses on three main policy papers connected to the reform and examines the use and production of evidence therein. Drawing on bibliometric research and research on educational policy, we aim to provide insight into how to utilize…

Existing literature finds that holistic admission practices may result in biased decision-making at the undergraduate and doctoral level. This decision-making may happen during the application review or policymaking process. Few studies directly examine master's admission processes as a unique entity. Additionally, researchers have not yet…

This article explores a promising new approach to college admissions: direct admissions. Direct admissions bypasses traditional college admissions processes such that students are automatically and proactively admitted to college. There are both state and institutional direct admissions systems. In some state-level programs, all students are…

The college admissions process can be confusing and inconsistent, requiring students to navigate a complex web of information, procedures, and admissions requirements from different postsecondary institutions. All of these require extensive social and cultural capital, which many students do not possess (Klasik 2012). Systemic change in college…

After 50 years studying opportunity for higher education, the author is somewhat comfortable (and very uncomfortable too) stating the issues he has sought to address and warned about that underlie the current political chaos. The failure to address these issues (higher education included) have boiled over: (1) income inequality has been surging…

The relationship between decentralization and inequality remains puzzling. The primary objective of this paper is to study the effects of decentralization on regional education inequality in China where national higher education policies systematically prioritize large cities. We apply the Gini coefficient and the econometric model of regional…

Affirmative Action in higher education exemplifies interest convergence, and beyond this, interest divergence and imperialistic reclamation. Diversity initiatives, such as the Inclusive Excellence initiative, have adopted key strategies and reasoning developed in Affirmative Action Supreme Court cases. This paper shows how semantic concessions and…

The linguistic characteristics of text productions depend on various factors, including individual language proficiency as well as the tasks used to elicit the production. To date, little attention has been paid to whether some writing tasks are more suitable than others to represent and differentiate students' proficiency levels. This issue is…

Access to higher education is often competitive, and much attention has been placed on the question of admission decision-making in such high stakes situations. We identify various approaches to distributive justice and consider these under the framework developed by Pike distinguishes between 'egalitaria' (everyone gets the same); 'necessitia'…

External privatisation of public education has emerged in Finland in the admission to higher education. A field analysis of thematic interviews (N = 22) with powerful actors in the private educational market and middle-class young people applying for places at universities in the highly competitive disciplines of medicine and law was conducted.…

Whether employers may inquire about an individual's past criminal history has gained attention in state policy arenas. In 2016 the Department of Education issued a report encouraging higher education institutions across the United States to forgo inquiring about criminal history on college admissions applications. To date, research on ban the box…

Widening participation in higher education for under-represented groups is a priority internationally. In Australia, the most common entry pathway for domestic undergraduate students is by obtaining an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) in the final year of secondary school. The ATAR system, however, has been criticised as disadvantaging…