In the 1930s, American colleges and universities began to screen applications using the SAT, a mass-administered, IQ-descended standardized test. The widespread adoption of the test accompanied the development of the world's first mass higher education system--and served to promote the idea that the United States was becoming a…

In this paper, Caitlin Murphy Brust and Hannah Widmaier begin with the assumption that highly selective institutions of higher education in the United States have a duty to promote civic equality. They employ Wendy Salkin's theory of informal political representation to examine how highly selective institutions should go about promoting civic…

Access to higher education is often competitive, and much attention has been placed on the question of admission decision-making in such high stakes situations. We identify various approaches to distributive justice and consider these under the framework developed by Pike distinguishes between 'egalitaria' (everyone gets the same); 'necessitia'…

For decades, educators and policy makers have decried low graduation rates at US colleges, advocating policies and making investments to improve graduation. We analyze a decade of Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data for four-year colleges to investigate how much institutions have improved their graduation rates from 2008…

The culturally diverse higher education settings is conceptualized to facilitate indigenous university students in Taiwan to establish a deeper connection with and understand the meaning of their ethnic identity. Guided by the ethnic identity development theory and school ethnic-racial socialization framework, we asked two research questions: (1)…

In this paper, I argue a new politics of ordinal differentiation and its instruments for governing education aims to make invisible a 'low intensity civil war' against the labouring classes. It does this through the elevation and ubiquity of actuarial and quantitative measures aimed at producing a new form of differentiated belonging: that of…

This dissertation investigates the impact of information and policy on the efficiency of higher education financing, particularly for low-income students in Latin America. Through three empirical studies, it addresses the barriers posed by information asymmetries and institutional discretion in student loan and college admission processes and…