A recent, widely publicized scandal involved students who obtained fraudulent diagnoses of learning disabilities in an effort to get accommodations on college admissions tests. Although the exact circumstances of the scandal are unusual, the methods used to obtain diagnoses and accommodations illustrate widespread problems with current policies.…

What does it cost to recruit an undergraduate student? How many front-line staff do campuses have for each new undergraduate? Where do campuses expect to focus their budget resources? "The 2020 Cost of Recruiting an Undergraduate Student Report" provides findings from a survey of campus enrollment managers and admissions directors. This…

The newest edition to the National Resource Center's series on Special Student Populations focuses on supporting LGBTQ+ students on campus. Despite increasing visibility and acceptance in some spheres, many LGBTQ+ students continue to experience a negative climate on college campuses, presenting barriers to their academic and personal success.…

First-time entrants to tertiary education are required to make interconnected decisions about their field of study, the fees they will pay and the application requirements they are prepared to face. Their choice of programme and institution will be influenced by the costs and entry criteria. The decisions they make about what to study and where…

One of the major claims of the report of University of California's Task Force on Standardized Testing is that SAT and ACT scores are superior to high-school grades in predicting how students will perform at UC. This finding has been widely reported in the news media and cited in several editorials favoring UC's continued use of SAT/ACT scores in…

Selective college admissions are fundamentally a question of tradeoffs: Given capacity, admitting one student means rejecting another. Research to date has generally estimated average effects of college selectivity, and has been unable to distinguish between the effects on students gaining access and on those losing access under alternative…

We provide the first estimated economic impacts of students' access to an entire sector of public higher education in the U.S. Approximately half of Georgia high school graduates who enroll in college do so in the state's public four-year sector, which requires minimum SAT scores for admission. Regression discontinuity estimates show enrollment in…

This paper reports on the findings of an ESRC funded project that contributes to the evidence base underpinning contextualised approaches to undergraduate admissions in England. We show that the bolder use of reduced entry requirements for disadvantaged learners is necessary if ambitious new widening access targets set by the Office for Students…

The past two decades have witnessed growing interest in Higher Education (HE) achievement standards. Globally, the English Language Teaching (ELT) sector provides students with Direct Entry (DE) English language program (ELP) pathways to university study. It has typically relied on commercially available English language tests to ensure…

Graduate student enrollment has become increasingly important for universities. At the same time, competition for graduate students has increased, and the way those students search for programs of study has changed dramatically in the digital era. How can your program adapt and reach its graduate enrollment goals? This benchmark survey report…

Health care experiences, access to care, and health outcomes improve for minority patients when medical providers share concordant race and/or ethnicity. However, current physician assistant (PA) demographics are not comparable to their patient populations. As an example, African Americans represented 4.5% of PA providers in 2019, while the U.S.…

I study how postsecondary admission policies affect the composition and subsequent academic outcomes of new cohorts. I leverage the staggered replacement of lotteries and waitlists at California's community college nursing programs with admissions that rely on grades, work experience, and other measures. The change in admissions increased the…

Higher education institutions have the societal role and responsibility of providing guidance to their members and the surrounding community. Institutions endeavored, and are still striving, to illustrate multi-faceted practices that can be integrated into the founding principles of an educational institution. And that can pave its way through the…

In this study, researchers at a large, urban, comprehensive minority-serving institution used propensity score matching to identify a unique comparison group to study academic and graduate school outcomes in students served by the National Institutes of Health-funded Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) Initiative. Acknowledging…

Higher education has expanded at astonishing rates around the world. We seek to understand the oppositions that periodically arise, which may produce enrollment declines and/or imposition of political controls. The post-1945 growth of higher education was -- to a greater extent than is often recognized -- propelled by the liberal, and later…