Largely because of their high aspirations for their children, many Chinese immigrants are acutely aware of the University of California's new undergraduate-admissions policy. With the new policy, the Board of Regents hopes to widen the applicant pool and give campuses more flexibility in selecting students. Asian-Americans bitterly oppose it,…

One after another at this time of year, elite colleges trumpet the outstanding SAT scores of the applicants they have admitted. The question often raised by such announcements is just how much those scores matter. Two recent studies conclude that they matter quite a lot. This article reports that researchers assert that selective colleges give…

Over the last decade, admissions has become a front-page fixation, and the industry's professionals have higher profiles than ever, on campuses and off. In turn, today's admissions jobs come with heavy doses of prestige and pressure. In this article, the authors discuss the results of a new survey of college officers which suggest that, despite…

The college admissions process teaches students how to express themselves during interviews, how to describe their best qualities in application essays. It may also make them wary of college marketing campaigns, and skeptical of being treated as a statistics, due to the large role played by standardized-test scores and grade-point averages. Such…