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…

New York City's elite public specialized high schools have a long history of offering a rigorous college preparatory education to the City's most academically talented students. Though immensely popular and highly selective, their policy of admitting students on the basis of a single entrance exam has been heavily criticized. Many argue, for…

Two broad messages emerge from the case of The Regents of the University of California vs. Allan Bakke: (1) there is a need for strengthening the "soft" or difficult-to-quantify data used in admissions decisions; and (2) there is a need to implement concepts of educational due process in the admissions procedure. These two exist in some…

Although high school art classes stress creativity, abstracting, analytical and evaluative skills, personal motivation, caring, and commitment to one one's own work, college admissions policies tend to undervalue them. To improve the quality of education, college admissions policies should take art as seriously as other "academic" subjects. (JBM)

Presents a series of studies that show how applicant-reported biodata, together with standard academic criteria, were used to select candidates in one Canadian preservice teacher education program. Analysis of data from 1986-90 indicates that assigning equal weight to academic and personal criteria has several advantages. (SM)

The admissions decision-making process at Dartmouth College is described in transcriptions of National Public Radio broadcasts. Applicants who are accepted have to be approved at Round Table, where their cases are considered for 30 days by 13 admission officers. These Round Table discussions of specific applicants, whose identities are concealed,…

The selective admissions issue in higher education is examined in this book from three perspectives. Part One on public policy and academic policy includes comments and recommendations by the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education. A report by Winton H. Manning in Part Two deals with fairness, including: the role of values in…

Truths and myths involved with student admission to Ivy League colleges are revealed by a director of admissions whose experience includes admission work at Vassar, Bowdoin, Harvard and Yale. Several basic concepts are offered as fact: most private colleges in America today are not highly selective; many colleges pose as being more selective than…

The public policy and legal issues surrounding preferential admissions of minorities in higher education and the politics and human drama of the controversy are reviewed and analyzed in this book. Focus is on the court cases of Marco DeFunis against the University of Washington law school and Allan Bakke against the University of California…

This paper looks at the selection of students in Australia for trades-based prevocational or pre-apprenticeship courses. Selections for two types of courses are considered in the paper: (1) pre-apprenticeship courses that focus on a particular trade area and usually lead to credit in only one apprenticeship course; and (2) prevocational courses…