While benefits of college matriculation are well-established, the portal controlling access to higher education is the institutional application. The bulk of the college application process takes place during a student's senior or 12th-grade year; however, parents and caregivers of high school students need to know that the quest for college…

The author examines surveys indicating that, in general, community college students are significantly less inclined and less able than students at four-year colleges to earn a bachelor's degree. He argues that it is important for teachers of English to understand the numerous conditions that limit the first group's chances for such "success."…

This note looks at the quality of the information on family income that selective colleges rely on to increase equality of opportunity by recruiting high-ability, low-income students. Individual family income estimates embedded in the College Board's search parameters are compared, for 635 recent Williams matriculants, with their incomes as…

This study used critical race theory to examine how African American adolescents negotiated race and class identity at Wells Academy, a predominately white, independent school. Interviews were conducted, exploring the experiences of six African American high school students. Their counterstories were analyzed focusing on the critique of…

This paper presents survey data concerning the procedure for determining Class Rank and Valedictorian status at 232 of the 500 largest public high school districts in the United States. These data are analyzed to consider whether or not districts are currently employing methodologies that provide students with appropriate incentives and provide…

Universities are encouraged to widen access to a broad range of applicants, including mature students taking Access qualifications. Admissions tutors can find it difficult to compare and choose between Access and A-level applications, and Access applicants for popular courses may be disadvantaged relative to students with good A-levels. In this…

New evidence is provided about the degree of social segregation in England's secondary schools, employing a cross-national perspective. Analysis is based on data for 27 industrialised countries from the 2000 and 2003 rounds of the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA). We allow for sampling variation in the estimates. England is…

The Study of Exceptional Talent (SET) identifies students who exhibit extremely advanced mathematical and/or verbal reasoning abilities and helps them find the challenging educational programs they need to achieve their full potential. Specifically, students who score 700-800 on the mathematical or verbal portion of SAT I before the age of 13 are…

We apply propensity score matching to the estimation of differential school effectiveness between the publicly funded private sector and the public sector in a sample of 26 countries. This technique allows us to distinguish between school choice and school effectiveness processes and thus to account for selectivity issues involved in the…

Debates about access and success are currently vigorous in higher education. There is much greater equity in terms of access but success in higher education continues to be racially patterned and far too few students graduate. This article argues for a more selective approach to access that is driven more deliberately by the need for increased…

The purpose of this research was to examine the college and career plans of a high-achieving group of students, high school valedictorians, to determine whether the females had equal aspirations with the males at the end of the senior year of high school in terms of their intended college major, the selectivity of their chosen college, and for…

This paper assesses the effectiveness of financial aid in promoting the persistence of black and Hispanic students admitted to the most selective colleges and universities in the United States to complete their college education. To explore whether more dollars of aid enhance graduation, the analysis separates two constructs--aid eligibility and…

This article reports the findings of a new study conducted by the two researchers at Princeton University, Douglas S. Massey and Margarita Mooney. The study was based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, which covers about 3,900 students who entered 28 public and private selective colleges in the fall of 1999. The study found…

This work reviews race-based admission and its alternatives, as well as the benefits of diversity on college campuses. This entails an overview of the research regarding the effectiveness of class-based approaches to achieving diversity and evidence of the importance of establishing a critical mass of persons of color at predominately white…

To judge whether better-informed consumers of higher education, the families of faculty, make different choices than other similarly endowed consumers, we compare the pattern of colleges chosen by 4742 children of college and university faculty with the pattern chosen by the children of non-faculty families of similar socio-economic status. The…