This study illuminates how common holistic admissions practices at so-called "elite" colleges and universities favor high-SES, high wealth applicants through the ways they define and consider "exceptional" performance in extracurricular activities. While many studies have established advantages to high-income applicants based…

In line with global trends, China experienced a rapid expansion in its higher education system in the second half of the twentieth century, and has seen especially large growth since the early 2000s. The expansion of higher education means an increase in the total quantity of educational opportunities. Although it is expected that education…

The research brought forward examines the evolution of the selective social processes that have accompanied educational expansion over the long term, referring to the case of France. It is based on an original index which addresses the issue of assessing inequality within the selection process for access to various educational levels. The results…

HEPI's last foray into the debate on academic selection suggested grammar schools are successful in helping their poorer pupils reach highly-selective universities. In this response, a diverse set of voices use the latest evidence to challenge the idea that grammar school systems serve pupils better than comprehensive schools. This collection of…

Inequality in the United States has been rising in recent decades, while intergenerational mobility remains low. This means that absolute mobility--the extent to which children are economically better off than their parents--is declining, and intergenerational inequality is increasingly entrenched. A long literature suggests large returns to…

With approximately three times the resources per pupil in private compared with state schools, Britain's private sector presents an interesting case of what could be expected from schools that are extremely well resourced. This paper studies the links between private schooling and educational performance in upper secondary school, as measured…

Attempts to make higher education more equitable more readily succeed at the aggregate (sector) level than at the institutional, with students from disadvantaged groups being overrepresented in low-status institutions. It is suggested that this is because policies of "fairness" (i.e. proportional representation) dominate the contemporary…

For decades, social theorists have posited--and descriptive accounts have shown--that students isolated by both social class and ethnicity suffer extreme deprivations that limit the effectiveness of equal-opportunity interventions. Even educational programs that yield positive results for moderately disadvantaged students may not prove beneficial…

Tuition discounting is a tactic deployed by many private four-year institutions as a means for enhancing either tuition revenue or institutional image. This study examines associations between "socioeconomic diversity" and two aspects of institutional grants--"freshman discount rate" and "freshman grant recipient discount…

Previous studies have shown that state performance funding policies do not increase baccalaureate degree production, but higher education scholarship lacks a rigorous, quantitative analysis of the unintended consequences of performance funding. In this article, we use difference-in-differences estimation with fixed effects to evaluate performance…

The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) 2020 Trustee Index is the third annual survey of governing board members regarding matters imperative to the higher education sector, as well as to the colleges, universities, and multicampus systems they hold in trust. This AGB survey, conducted in collaboration with Gallup,…

This paper examines the characteristics of students admitted to Russian universities with different levels of selectivity. First, we argue that students differ not only by the results of the Unified State Exam (USE), the university entrance exam, but by family and school characteristics, and by educational strategies. Next, it is shown that the…

Postsecondary undermatch occurs when students fail to enroll at a college or university that possesses a level of selectivity their academic credentials would permit them to attend. Given the demonstrated link between selective college attendance and postsecondary and professional attainment, recent studies have attempted to examine which factors…

The debate over affirmative action policies in higher education is not so much about whether having racially and ethnically diverse college campuses is desirable, but rather about how best to achieve that worthy objective. Most universities prefer employing explicit racial preferences that allow them to recruit and admit the highest-scoring black…

Although we know a great deal about college choice in nations such as the United States, we know considerably less about how college choice operates in settings lacking well-defined hierarchies between higher education institutions. In the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, students from high socio-economic status backgrounds are…