Annual rankings provide easily consumable quantitative information that prospective students and their families use to make decisions about applications and admissions offers. One popular ranking is Princeton Review's Party Schools, which receives national attention and condemnation by institutional leaders. We analyzed IPEDS and Clery Act data…

Benefits of cooperative (co-op) education have been investigated, mainly by surveying students already enrolled in co-op programs. In contrast, this paper investigates prospective students' perceptions of co-op. This was done by analyzing over 33,000 applications to undergraduate engineering programs in a large North American university. Text…

This paper examines the social fever of MBBS (undergraduate medical) aspiration in India. It analyzes interviews conducted with 139 pharmacy graduates and 37 currently enrolled students in the western Indian state of Gujarat, of whom 147 pursued but failed to get admission to medical college. Respondents include graduates from the 1970s onwards.…

Increasing applications to U.S. osteopathic and allopathic medical schools requires admissions offices and committees to continual seek new evaluative measures to identify and selective the most qualified applicants for interviews and ultimately admission to their institutions. The use of situational judgement tests (SJTs) help identify applicants…

Meeting today's prospective college students where they are is key to staying ahead of current enrollment challenges. Understanding which messages resonate with which students and at certain parts of the enrollment funnel helps to ensure institutions are getting the right message, to the right student, at the right time in their journey. By…

Recent statistics found the prevalence of dyslexia in UK medical schools to be 7%, sitting below the national prevalence of 10%. The factors contributing to this discrepancy are currently unknown, but may result from an interplay of individual and systemic barriers to entering medicine. This collaborative, analytic autoethnography aimed to use the…

An increasing number of colleges and universities now require graduate student and faculty applicants to submit personal diversity statements for evaluation. Despite their rising use, little is known about how the personal diversity statement writing process is experienced by applicants. For White individuals in particular, their sources of…

Mexican Americans have been native to the United States for centuries, but their educational attainment numbers reflect an achievement gap. This has led to increased poverty levels, low social capital, and low quality of benefits. One way to increase social mobility for a racial group is by increasing the number of bachelor's degree holders.…

This study examined the role of chief admission officers (CAOs) in Research 1 (R1) public flagship institutions and how they understand and address the misalignment between admission criteria to STEM majors and the disparate access to STEM opportunities for diverse students in the applicant pool. The research questions this study explored were (a)…

We use the score reports of 375,000 US-based GMAT® test takers to document patterns of mismatch between student ability and school quality. We find substantial levels of mismatch in candidates' selection of MBA programs for score-sending, and by extension, applications. The evidence suggests that the high levels of mismatch in the selection of…

Understanding students' college enrollment decisions is critical because the admission outcome can affect the school's quality and its reputation. In this paper, we study how students consider their relative academic ability compared to their potential peers. Drawing from social comparison theory, we posit that there are asymmetric effects due to…

The term "summer melt" denotes a phenomenon when post-secondary students who received an offer of admission and may have paid a deposit when accepting the offer, "fail to enroll at all in the fall after high school graduation". Assessing the extent of summer melt and the success of measures to reduce it has become more relevant…

Dual enrollment (DE) is one of the fastest growing programs that support the high school-to-college transition. Yet, there is limited empirical evidence about its impact on either students' college application choices or admission outcomes. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach on data from two cohorts of ninth-grade students in one…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the process of using simulation to select candidates from a pool of teacher-education-programme applicants, considering the applicants' perspective. The population of applicants to teacher-education programmes has been the subject of numerous studies; however, only a minor portion of these examined the…

Given the steady decline in undergraduate admissions over the past decade, universities in the United States have a unique imperative to use positive, targeted, and niche marketing techniques that focus on building brand equity among members of underrepresented groups, including Black students. Despite significant efforts by university leaders and…