This article advocates for increased attention on the college admission letter to strengthen conditionally admitted students' academic self-efficacy as they begin the college experience. Although first communications are often considered perfunctory, the language of admission materials has strong potential to help at-risk students begin…

As human services professionals, we in higher education value helping people and often get personally invested in their stories. The people we serve, primarily students, face challenges in applying and paying for college, completing coursework and degrees, and finding employment after graduation. Along the way, college administrators strive to…

The development of college admissions requirements during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was basically the story of the admission policies and practices at Harvard College. Candidates for admission were examined on their ability to read and translate Latin and Greek, and a careful check was made of their character and background. With…

This article is a response to John Silber's article, "Marketing Higher Education: The Survival Value of Integrity." Silber speaks to the very heart of the academy about its integrity and ethics, and does so in timeless fashion through the decades to the current era. In his introduction, he characterizes the "business of education" as inevitable…

Males have significantly higher average scores than females on the SAT I quantitative section, which is designed to predict first-year college success in mathematics. However, it has been shown that gender gaps in performance on the SAT I have little to do with college readiness; rather they are due to the misaligned content of the instrument, as…

A single innovation within a community can elicit completely opposite reactions from members who, in good faith, are all working toward the same goal. If this assumption is true--if one person's solution has the potential to be another person's problem--then how does one determine whose interests prevail? As members of National Association for…

The advent of the modern form of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), brought to bear by the combination of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Harvard's former president James Bryant Conant (Lemann 1999), was designed to promote the recognition of talent and intellect, wherever they may be found. Their aim was to provide greater educational…

The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which cognitive and non-cognitive measures predict academic success for conditionally-admitted students enrolled in a comprehensive public university. Stepwise multiple regression analyses reveal that one cognitive variable (high school grade point average) and two non-cognitive measures…

Community colleges enroll nearly half the undergraduates in the U.S. These institutions play a significant role in the academic, social, political, and economic future of our nation. As historically open admission institutions, with a primary focus on providing access to higher education, they have been pressed in recent decades--as has all of…

There is no shortage of places in higher education--most noncompetitive colleges could admit more students, but institutions often struggle to get the class that they want. Professionals consider the admission process successful when they are able to configure a class that meets the institution's many missions and notions, rather than just…

This study examined pre-college variables from an admission-office perspective and the ability of these variables to predict college grade point average (GPA) for students specially admitted into an academic support program for at-risk students. The research was conducted at a private, highly-selective, research university in the southwest United…

This article from the "Journal of College Admission's" Special Diversity Issue (which in its entirety won the 1997 Muir Award), presents a compilation of three speeches, given at the 51st National Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. The preface, by Mary Lee Hoganson, serves to bind the three speeches together under the cohesive question, "Are…

Professional program admission at U.S. universities has become increasingly competitive in the last 20 years, due to enrollment caps, core class requirements, transfer course acceptance, industry draw, and the appeal of starting salaries. As the competition steadily increases, students often find methods to exploit traditional policy, resulting in…

This paper describes the college admission process through the conceptual lens of Dickason's (2001) phases of affirmative action. The first phase, obligatory affirmative action, describes the history of affirmative action and the impact on college admission. The second phase, voluntary affirmative action, describes University of West Florida's…

While the recent growth of homeschooling in America may not be an overall threat to public education in America today, some school districts are reporting that they are experiencing declines in their enrollments, which ultimately means a revenue loss in their school districts (Hetzner, 2000; Vater, 2001). The U.S. homeschool population (K-12) is…