Low-income students are underrepresented at selective colleges. Most evaluative criteria used by admissions officers are correlated with income, including test scores and performance in high school. Inspired in part by the current state of the use of testing in college admissions, this study examines how the quality of colleges attended by…

The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of educational choice on the intention to enter the examination, and the mediating role of career decision-making self-efficacy. A total of 1391 freshmen from six higher vocational colleges in Guangdong Province of China were investigated with Education Choices Scale, Career Decision-Making…

Legal education scholars have argued that law schools strategically use Students of Color for enrollment management purposes; they can admit more to meet admission targets, but they should not enroll so many that they need to open new course sections. As law school applications decline, we analyze enrollment panel data reported to the American Bar…

As a practitioner who has scored many admission essays, the author has noticed that numerous colleges and universities include questions that seek to expose and evaluate students' interactions with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Frequently, applicants are encouraged to disclose a difficult moment in their life and share how they overcame it.…

For years, discussions on inequality in college admissions have addressed standardized tests, but less is known about inequality in nonstandardized components of applications. We analyzed extracurricular activity descriptions in 6,054,104 applications submitted through the Common Application using natural language processing methods. Overall,…

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.…

Analysis of data on school leavers in Scotland points towards considerable inequality in access to higher education. This is highlighted in terms of participation in higher education by young people from lower-income households or identifying as first in their families to consider going to university. The situation is more acute in terms of access…

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.…

Today, numerous countries utilize unified methods and systematic standardized examinations such as national examinations as formal procedures to select qualified applicants for admission to higher education institutions since higher education is viewed as the major path and criterion to upward mobility. In Iran, the university entrance examination…

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…

Personal statements are among the most commonly used instruments in college admissions procedures. Yet, little research on their reliability, validity, and fairness exists. The first aim of this paper was to investigate hypotheses about adverse impact and underprediction for female applicants, which could result from lower tendencies to use…

Annual rankings provide easily consumable quantitative information that prospective students and their families use to make decisions about applications and admissions offers. One popular ranking is Princeton Review's Party Schools, which receives national attention and condemnation by institutional leaders. We analyzed IPEDS and Clery Act data…

Benefits of cooperative (co-op) education have been investigated, mainly by surveying students already enrolled in co-op programs. In contrast, this paper investigates prospective students' perceptions of co-op. This was done by analyzing over 33,000 applications to undergraduate engineering programs in a large North American university. Text…

This paper examines the social fever of MBBS (undergraduate medical) aspiration in India. It analyzes interviews conducted with 139 pharmacy graduates and 37 currently enrolled students in the western Indian state of Gujarat, of whom 147 pursued but failed to get admission to medical college. Respondents include graduates from the 1970s onwards.…

Increasing applications to U.S. osteopathic and allopathic medical schools requires admissions offices and committees to continual seek new evaluative measures to identify and selective the most qualified applicants for interviews and ultimately admission to their institutions. The use of situational judgement tests (SJTs) help identify applicants…