Despite being academically unqualified for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, Abigail Fisher, a White female, argued that she was not admitted due to the university's diversity policy. In addition to framing postsecondary admissions as a zero-sum phenomenon, Ms. Fisher intentionally frames students of color who are admitted to the…

Author Alexis Brooke Redding is an advanced doctoral student and instructor in education at Harvard University. In the spring of 2015 she spent six weeks interviewing administrators and students about the myriad pathways that bring students to Hampshire College. More than simply understanding the nature of this singular campus, her study focused…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which the Trump administration ban on individuals from 7 Muslim-majority countries (i.e., Executive Order 13769), influenced prospective international graduate applicants to two Texas institutions. Inferential statistical procedures revealed the presence of a statistically significant, sharp…

Substantial disparities in college enrollment rates exist across racial and socioeconomic groups in the United States. A key goal of education policy is to help remediate this inequity by providing equal opportunity and access to all students. However, to develop better policy, one needs to understand the underlying causes of these disparities.…

This study investigated the relationship between psychocultural, sociocultural, college knowledge, and citizenship status factors on Latinx high school students' college enrollment. Participants included 307 Latinx ninth-grade students enrolled across four high schools in central Texas that were followed post-high school graduation. Results…

Students who attend different colleges in the U.S. end up with vastly different economic outcomes. We study the role of relative value-added across colleges within student choice sets in producing these outcome disparities. Linking high school, college, and earnings registries spanning the state of Texas, we identify relative college value-added…

Access to higher education begins with a student's decision whether and where to apply to college. This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in college application behavior of high school graduates, using two recent graduation cohorts from Texas. We estimate racial and ethnic differences in the probability of applying to college,…

A growing body of literature is demonstrating that a number of students who are academically prepared for postsecondary fail to make the transition to college. The purpose of this study is to explore the relative influence of student and school level factors on three stages in students' college-going process: application, admission, and…

Pre-college advising programs exist in most disadvantaged high schools throughout the United States. These programs supplement traditional advising by high school guidance counselors and attempt to help underrepresented and disadvantaged students overcome the complexities of the postsecondary admission and financial aid processes. Existing…

Race-based affirmative action policies are widespread in higher education. Despite the prevalence of these policies, there is little consensus on how affirmative action policies affect students either before they reach college or after they matriculate into college. This study provides new evidence on the benefits of affirmative action policies…

Although many programs remotely disseminate information to students about the college application process, there is little evidence as to how students experience these programs. This paper examines a large-scale remote counseling program in which college counselors initiated interactions with 15,000 high school seniors via text message to support…

Using race as a factor in admissions policies was contested in "Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin." Although the U.S. Supreme Court firmly held in "Grutter v. Bollinger" that race can be considered among many factors in admitting students, the recent decision in "Fisher" has posed many questions and challenges…

Despite being academically unqualified for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, Abigail Fisher, a White female, argued that she was not admitted due to the university's diversity policy. In addition to framing post-secondary admissions as a zero-sum phenomenon, Ms. Fisher intentionally framed students of color who are admitted to the…

This qualitative case study investigated how the GEAR-Up college readiness program influenced the postsecondary decisions of Hispanic students who participated in the GEAR-Up program for the recommended six-year period in a rural school district in Texas. It was not known how long-term participation in the GEAR-Up program at a rural school…

The Texas 10% law states that students who graduated among the top 10% of their high school class are guaranteed admission to public universities in Texas. We estimate the causal effects of this admissions guarantee on a sequence of connected decisions: students' application behavior, admission decisions by the university, students' enrollment…