(Edweek) by Catherine Gewertz.
A newly published study shows that admission officers at selective colleges are more likely to offer spots to low-income students if they have a better understanding of the high schools those students attend.
The study suggests that a relatively simple intervention—providing additional details about the context from which a student comes—could increase representation of low-income students on college campuses. It found that when admission officers have more detailed information about low-income students’ schools, they’re 26 percent to 28 percent more likely to admit them.
Michael N. Bastedo, the director of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education, and Nicholas A. Bowman, the director of the University of Iowa’s Center for Research on Undergraduate Education, published their findings this month in the latest edition of the journal Educational Researcher. (An abstract is freely available, but the full report requires a subscription.) Go to the article
