24. Contextualize application information to enable comparisons on unequal educational opportunity.
Here’s what the federal government can do:
- The U.S. Department of Education should make information available about unequal educational opportunity through tools such as the Civil Rights Data Collection and NCES surveys.
- The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights should provide guidance on how to lawfully consider unequal educational opportunity in the context of admissions decisions.
Here’s what institutional leaders can do:
- Higher education institutions should provide admissions officers with information about unequal educational opportunity to contribute to holistic reviews of student application.
Public and private institutions can enhance their admissions process by identifying tools that facilitate holistic review to better understand the context of an applicant’s experiences.
Admission officers should build upon their ability to collect and meaningfully evaluate data that offer greater insights into their applicant pool. Admissions officers and enrollment managers can consider adopting tools that support holistic reviews within the context of the opportunities available to students where they live.[i] Information about the barriers to success a student is likely to have confronted enables admissions officers to understand accomplishments in a different way. For students coming from communities with low graduation rates, limited access to STEM courses and advanced coursework, or few public libraries, this information could show the extraordinariness of an AP math score or their job at the local library.
[i] The College Board’s Landscape tool, for example, provides information about high school location; senior class size; percentage of students eligible for free reduced lunch; average SAT score at colleges attended by students from the high school’s three most recent graduating classes; AP participation and average scores; SAT/ACT high school score averages; neighborhood data on college attendance; and household structure, median family income, housing stability, education level, and crime rates. A study on 43 institutions that participated in the College Board’s Landscape pilot program found that applicants from the most under-resourced schools and neighborhood contexts saw a 5 percentage point increase in probability of admission. Mabel, Zachary; Hurwitz, Michael; Howell, Jessica; Perfetto, Greg. “Can standardizing applicant high school and neighborhood information help to diversify selective colleges?” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, September 2022. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1347393.