Holistic Admissions Practices
Bastedo, Michael N. 2023. “The Urgency of Fair and Equitable Holistic Review of College Applicants.” The Campagin for College Opportunity.
- This brief is focused on holistic review, a strategy in college admissions that assesses an applicant’s unique experiences alongside a range of indicators that include grades, extracurriculars, environmental context, and other factors. For admissions officers, it is a powerful tool and a fairer and more thoughtful approach to reviewing student applications and ensuring a more diverse student body.
Bastedo, Michael N., Mark Umbricht, Emma Bausch, Bo-Kyung Byun, and Yiping Bai. 2023. “How Well Do Contextualized Admissions Measures Predict Success for Low-Income Students, Women, and Underrepresented Students of Color?.” Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 1-16.
- While a growing number of studies have examined how incorporating contextualized measures of high school performance may benefit traditionally underrepresented students at the college admissions stage, not as much is known about how such contextualized measures of high school performance relate to these students’ college performance upon admission. Based on a Midwestern state’s Department of Education database, this study finds that contextualized measures of high school performance are strongly associated with college success for women, low-income students, and minoritized students of color. Compared to other measures of high school performance (i.e., ACT scores), both raw and contextualized high school grade point average (GPA) also have a stronger, more consistent relationship with first-year college GPA, first-year college retenetion, and graduation within four years. These findings present implications for how holistic review is understood and implemented for traditionally underrepresented students, especially inlight od the current move toward test-optional and test-free policies.
Bastedo, Michael N., Mark Umbricht, Emma Bausch, Bo-Kyung Byun, and Yiping Bai. 2023. “Contextualized High School Performance: Evidence to Inform Equitable Holistic, Test-Optional, and Test-Free Admissions Policies.” AERA Open, 9(1), 1-19.
- Holistic admissions practices require evaluating an applicant’s credentials in light of the opportunities available in their high school context. High school grades, test scores, and course taking are clearly related to college grades, retention, and graduation. But does performance in high school context also relate to college success? Building a unique dataset of 2.3 million students in a Midwestern state, we find that contextualized indicators of high school grades and standardized tests are strongly associated with student success in college, validating their use in holistic admissions. Contextualized grades have a stronger and more consistent association with college success than contextualized test scores, and may be most helpful at test-optional, test-free, and broader-access colleges that have yet to adopt holistic admissions practices.
Bastedo, Michael N., D’Wayne Bell, Jessica S. Howell, Julian Hsu, Michael Hurwitz, Greg Perfetto, and Meredith Welch. 2022. “Admitting Students in Context: Field Experiments on Information Dashboards in College Admissions” Journal of Higher Education.
- In this paper, we address whether the provision of contextual information about where students live and learn has the potential to expand postsecondary opportunities to students from disadvantaged neighborhoods and high schools. To examine this question, we describe the results of field experiments with admissions officers working in eight universities who re-read real applications from previous admissions cycles with a dashboard of contextual data about the applicant’s neighborhood and high school. In this low-stakes context, admissions officers from institutions utilizing holistic admissions practices were more likely to recommend admitting low-SES applicants when provided with contextual data. The experiment also primed admissions readers to treat students from highly disadvantaged high school and neighborhood contexts more favorably relative to the results of the high-stakes official read, even when the dashboard was not shown to study participants. The results of this experiment suggest that contextualized data can improve equity in admissions, but fidelity to holistic admissions practices is crucial.
Bastedo, Michael. 2021. “Holistic Admissions as a Global Phenomenon” In Heather Eggins, Anna Smolentseva, & Hans de Wit (Eds.), The Next Decade: Challenges for Global Higher Education. Leiden: Brill.
- Globally, standards for college selection have been historically dominated by national entrance examinations, with the U.S. an outlier in its development of holistic review for selective universities. This chapter discusses the gradual diffusion of elements of the U.S. holistic model to other admissions systems around the world, including Australia, China, England, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, and South Korea. There are many drivers of the move to holistic admissions, including student anxiety, stifled creativity and innovation, rote learning for examinations, shadow education, stratification and inequality, and workforce preparation. Serious concerns are raised across country contexts, however, including transparency, fairness, equity, and corruption.
Bastedo, Michael N., Nicholas A. Bowman, Kirsten M. Glasener, and Jandi L. Kelly. 2018. “What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Holistic Review? Selective College Admissions and Its Effects on Low-SES Students” Journal of Higher Education 89: 782-805.
- This mixed method study uses open-response survey data, focus groups, and an experimental simulation to explore how 311 admissions officers define and use concepts of holistic review in selective college admissions. We find that three distinct definitions of holistic review predominate in the field: whole file, whole person, and whole context. We explore these concepts qualitatively and use the coded data to predict decision-making in an experimental simulation. We find that admissions officers with a “whole context” view of holistic review are disproportionately likely to admit a low-SES applicant in our simulation. Inconsistent definitions of a core admissions concept make it more difficult for the public to comprehend the “black box” of college admissions, and a more consistently contextualized view of holistic review may also have real-world implications for the representation of low-income students at selective colleges.
Bowman, Nicholas A. and Michael N. Bastedo. 2018. “What Role May Admissions Office Diversity and Practices Play in Equitable Decisions?” Research in Higher Education: 430-447.
- Attending a selective college or university has a notable impact on the likelihood of graduation, graduate school attendance, social networks, and career earnings. Given these short-term and long-term benefits, surprisingly little research has directly explored the factors that might promote or detract from equitable admissions decisions at these schools. This study examined a unique national sample of 311 undergraduate admissions officers who work at selective institutions to explore this issue. Among the descriptive findings, more than half of respondents reported that they consider applicants’ demonstrated interest in attending their institution when making a recommendation, about two-thirds review at least 100 applications during busy weeks, and almost half were working at their alma mater. Moreover, in a simulation of admissions scoring, admissions officers from historically underrepresented groups were more likely to admit low-SES applicants, whereas participants with more work experience and who were employed at their alma mater provided less equitable recommendations.
Bastedo, Michael N., and Nicholas A. Bowman. 2017. “Improving Admission of Low-SES Students at Selective Colleges: Results From an Experimental Simulation” Educational Researcher.
Supplementary Online Material; Policy Brief
- Low socioeconomic status (SES) students are underrepresented at selective colleges, but the role that admissions offices play is poorly understood. Because admissions offices often have inconsistent information on high school contexts, we conducted a randomized controlled trial to determine whether providing detailed information on high school contexts increases the likelihood that admissions officers (n = 311) would recommend admitting low-SES applicants. Admissions officers in the detailed-information condition were 13 to 14 percentage points (i.e., 26%–28%) more likely to recommend admitting a low-SES applicant from an underserved high school than those in the limited-information condition, although the limited-information condition provided significant details about family SES and high school context. These findings were consistent regardless of the selectivity of the college, admissions office practices, and participant demographics.
Bastedo, Michael N., Joseph E. Howard, and Allyson Flaster. 2016. “Holistic Admissions after Affirmative Action: Does “Maximizing” the High School Curriculum Matter?” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 38: 389-409.
- Selective colleges and universities purport to consider students’ achievement in the context of the academic opportunities available in their high schools. Thus, students who “maximize” their curricular opportunities should be more likely to gain admission. Using nationally representative data, we examine the effect of “maximizing the curriculum” on admission to selective colleges. We find that curriculum maximization has very little effect on students’ probability of college admission outside of states with affirmative action bans. Low-income students are less likely to maximize their high school curriculum, and underrepresented racial minority students are both less likely to maximize their high school curriculum and less likely to benefit from doing so when applying to colleges in states that ban affirmative action. Thus, even if widely diffused, holistic admissions practices may be unlikely to adequately reduce race or class disparities in higher education.
Bastedo, Michael N. 2016. “Enrollment Management and the Low-Income Student: How Holistic Admissions and Market Competition Can Impede Equity.” P. 121-134 in Andrew P. Kelly, Jessica S. Howell, and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj (Eds.), Matching Students to Opportunity: Expanding College Choice, Access, and Quality. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press. (Originally a working paper for the American Enterprise Institue & Gates Foundation.)
- Low-income students constitute less than 5% of the enrollment at our most selective colleges, a percentage that has been virtually changed for decades. Many recent efforts define the problem as inadequate resources and asymmetric information among low-income students and thus focus on changing students’ application behavior. These efforts are admirable, but fail to take into account how decisions are made inside selective colleges, particularly in admissions and enrollment management. This paper discusses how holistic admissions practices, market competitive behaviors, and enrollment management largely determine college match, and the implications for policy debates on low-income students, institutional stratification, and undermatching.