This paper examines the factors influencing preferences for undergraduate study using administrative data on applications to the state university system of Sri Lanka, which is characterized by centralized administration, rule-based admissions, and virtually costless applications. The feature of costless applications implies that students are…

Going to university is a key route to enhancing life opportunities for young people and for promoting social mobility. Despite the action of widening participation programs, substantial sociodemographic inequalities in participation persist. Few studies have focused on the role that school attended may play in exacerbating or mitigating these…

Contextual admissions schemes are commonly used across the United Kingdom (UK) for admission into higher education (HE) institutions. These schemes consider an applicant's background and circumstances alongside academic achievement to provide a fairer evaluation of progression into university. Several contextual factors have been considered by HE…

This paper investigates the role played by self-confidence in college applications. Using incentivized experiments, we measure the self-confidence of more than 2,000 students applying to colleges in France. The best female students and students from low socioeconomic status (low-SES) significantly underestimate their rank in the grade distribution…

Admission professionals have come to recognize the potential of widening the admission criteria beyond standard academic measures-- such as high school transcripts, grade point average, and summative scores on college entrance exams--to understand student contexts, mindsets, and "college-ready" competencies, such as higher-order thinking…

This essay describes the work of faculty at a public university in the southeast to align their application process with CPED principles through the addition of structured behavioral interviews. Their work was grounded in the premise that redefinition of the EdD program to focus on the successful preparation of scholarly practitioners also…

Although vital to efforts to promote global psychological science, applicants from the Global South continue to experience numerous challenges in securing postbaccalaureate research positions and admission to graduate programs in the Global North. In the present study, international students and applicants (N = 81, M[subscript age] = 25.5 years,…

Letters of recommendation from school counselors are required to apply to many selective colleges and universities. Still, relatively little is known about how this non-standardized component may affect equity in admissions. We use cutting-edge natural language processing techniques to algorithmically analyze a national dataset of over 600,000…

Prospective graduate students' noncognitive attributes are commonly evaluated as a part of a holistic review of their admission applications. Yet it is difficult to determine which noncognitive attributes are considered by those who evaluate graduate admissions applications and what approaches they take to measure applicants' noncognitive…

College enrollment has increased over the years but so has the cost. The total cost of attending college -- including tuition, room and board, necessary books and supplies, and more -- would be prohibitive for most students if not for financial aid. Yet, many students still cite financial barriers as the top reason for opting out of college.…

This longitudinal study investigated the challenges and sources of community cultural wealth that underrepresented communication sciences and disorders (CSD) students leverage in navigating each application stage to master's level speech-language pathology (SLP) programs. Four surveys were distributed over 11 months via Qualtrics to CSD…

Many institutions have turned to individualized holistic review to make admissions decisions, which is meant to take a comprehensive view of the quantitative and qualitative elements that comprise a single application. Prior research shows holistic review lacks a common definition and the gap between theory and practice has not been thoroughly…

For many open-enrolled higher education institutions, including community colleges, enrollment is dropping each semester creating significant financial challenges. While much research literature focuses on four-year colleges, little is known about the students who seek to enroll at community colleges. What is known is often evaluated using college…

There is debate over whether Asian American students are admitted to selective colleges and universities at lower rates than white students with similar academic qualifications. However, there have been few empirical investigations of this issue, in large part due to a dearth of data. Here we present the results from analyzing 685,709 applications…

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…