Medical school admissions is a contentious and high stakes selection activity. Many assessment approaches are available to support selection; but how are decisions about building, monitoring, and adapting admissions systems made? What shapes the processes and practices that underpin selection decisions? We explore how these decisions are made…

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…

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…

Year 12 students in Big Picture Learning schools across Australia now use portfolios and interviews to apply for and gain entry to their first choice of university degree. They receive admission on the strength of portfolio evidence mapped to a new non-ATAR qualification, known as the International Big Picture Learning Credential (IBPLC). Since…

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…

Student engagement is a widely used approach for evaluation of the quality of higher education in many countries, because it is considered as a proxy for student learning and academic outcomes, especially when direct measures are unavailable. Pre-college characteristics can affect student engagement and should be taken into account when this…

Admission to selective colleges has grown more competitive, yielding student bodies that are unrepresentative of the U.S. population. Admission officers report using sorting (e.g., GPA, standardized tests) and concertedly cultivated (e.g., extracurricular activities) and ascriptive status (e.g., whether an applicant identifies as a member of a…

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'…

I estimate the effect of attending an associate's degree in nursing program on nursing licensure. I use student-level academic data for all California community college students, matched to public records on all nursing licenses earned in the state. I produce causal estimates using random variation from admissions lotteries at a large nursing…

This qualitative case study examined the efficacy of one university's academic interventions in support of conditionally admitted (CA) students during the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective was to gain insights into how academic interventions changed for CA students and how the students used academic interventions during COVID-19 at one four-year…

There is a nursing shortage in the United States which has become even more apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite qualified applicants, thousands of students are turned away from educational programs each year as programs reach capacity limits. The rejection may have social, psychological, and economic consequences for the student.…

Low-income high-achieving students are less likely than high-income peers to enroll in selective colleges. Financial certainty interventions can address administrative burdens that stifle their enrollment, even when colleges are tuition-free for them. However, we do not know whether these interventions are effective when students enjoy admissions…

Dual enrollment (DE) is one of the fastest growing programs that support the high school-to-college transition. Yet, there is limited empirical evidence about its impact on either students' college application choices or admission outcomes. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach on data from two cohorts of ninth-grade students in one…

More selective universities are presumably better in quality and expected to provide better labour market outcomes for their graduates -- returns premia. However, various empirical applications have found that part of it should be attributed to selectivity. Using the data on recent higher education graduates' entry salaries with a fuzzy regression…

The purpose of this paper is to document the indirect effects of the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan on professional school degrees awarded and to propose the far reach of the law as an alternative argument in support of race-conscious admissions policies challenged under the strict scrutiny standard. Designed around the two tests of strict scrutiny,…