This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT…

We examine the role of information in college matching behavior of low- and high-income students, exploiting a state automatic admissions policy that provides some students with perfect a priori certainty of college admissions. We find that admissions certainty encourages college-ready low-income students to seek more rigorous universities.…

A Review of the Nation's Teacher Preparation Programs, which studies and analyzes the results of all the teacher education programs and teacher candidates' examination scores in the United States, reveals disturbing statistics about the performance of teacher candidates on their certification examinations and the adverse effects this poor…

We investigate the efficacy and equity of college admissions criteria by estimating the effect of multiple measures of college readiness on college performance in the context of race-blind automatic admissions policies. We take advantage of a unique institutional feature of the Texas higher education system to control for selection into…

The Texas Ten Percent Plan (TTP) provides students in the top 10 percent of their high-school class with automatic admission to any public university in the state, including the two flagship schools, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M. Texas created the policy in 1997 after a federal appellate court ruled that the state's previous…

The federal mandate for "highly qualified" teachers, along with heightened scrutiny of public education, has resulted in the development of state-mandated teacher certification examinations across the nation. Since teacher education programs in Texas are held accountable for the success rates of program completers on the Texas…

One of the important arguments by critics of affirmative action is that it actually hurts the students it is supposed to help by subjecting them to the "stigma" of being admitted under policies explicitly seeking campus diversity. Such students, this theory argues, must feel embarrassed and uncomfortable as a result and would prefer to…

The Graduate Record Examination (GRE) General Tests and GRE advanced Psychology (PSYGRE) Test were correlated with several measures of success in our graduate program at Sam Houston State University including some specific courses. Significant correlations were obtained for several of these measures, but the PSYGRE provided incremental validity…

This article uses four data sets to assess changes in the relative weights of test- and performance-based merit criteria on college enrollment during the 1980s and 1990s and considers their significance for affirmative action. Our results support the "shifting meritocracy" hypothesis, revealed by selective postsecondary institutions'…