This dissertation explores issues involved in higher education admissions processes. It analyzes admissions and subsequent performance at the RAND Graduate School. Academic literature informs the presentation of statistical relationships among admissions criteria, admissions committee ratings and performance measures. Transformation techniques provide the foundation for a discussion of the merits of alternative ways of thinking about selection, performance measurement, and prediction. While the RAND Graduate School admissions committee implicitly gives great importance to Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores, different performance measures correlate most strongly with different selection criteria, complicating the establishment of screening rules. The empirical results show the statistical significance of several selection criteria in predicting a variety of measures of student performance and compare the significance of those criteria to the significance of quantified committee-member ratings in predicting the same performance measures. This report shows several techniques for transforming measures of selection criteria, ratings and performance, in order to discuss the appropriateness of relative and absolute measures. (Contains 113 references.) (MAH)