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Selective colleges have increasingly considered a variety of factors, such as academic rigor, extracurriculars, essays, interviews, recommendations, and background characteristics, alongside traditional academic factors in determining who is admitted. These efforts have been hailed as a strategy to expand access to selective higher education for talented students from racially and economically marginalized backgrounds. But such efforts introduce ambiguous admissions criteria-excellence in extracurriculars, subjective assessments of character and talent gleaned from essays, interviews, and recommendations-that may favor students from socially privileged families. We draw on nearly a decade of data on selective college admissions processes to examine how the importance of various admissions criteria relate to enrollment among racially and economically marginalized students. Using panel data from 2008 to 2016 and random effects analyses, our findings indicate ambiguous criteria that often comprise a more comprehensive approach to admissions may do little to ameliorate-and in some cases, may exacerbate-existing enrollment inequities. We also find that moving away from test scores and focusing on academic rigor represent potentially promising strategies for expanding access at some institutions.

Many postsecondary datasets collect gender data in ways that are not inclusive of all students. Many trans* students, those who identify as trans women, trans men, genderqueer, among other gender identities, are excluded when surveys collect gender data using only two categories. The American Bar Association recently became the first sector of higher education to collect and report enrollment data using three gender categories for all U.S. law schools. Between 2014 and 2019, there was a steady rise in the number of law schools that reported enrolling students in the “other” gender category. We interpret this growth to signify that law schools are beginning to collect data on students who were already there, not a reflection of exponential growth in trans* enrollment in law school. A more inclusive approach to gender data collection is necessary to better understand the educational trajectories of trans* students. However, data collection alone is not sufficient and may in fact be problematic. Importantly, we encourage quantitative researchers to consider their role in processes of administrative violence—that is, the ways in which the use of discrete identity categories (such as male, female and/or other) can create barriers for trans* students as they access healthcare, student housing and campus services.

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Policy discussions in the United States on the link between college majors and earnings have under-appreciated the role of cognitive skills. This study uses the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, a unique data set that contains information on individual cognitive skills, college majors and earnings to investigate the relationships between them. The authors find that variation in numeracy and literacy skills is significantly associated with earnings for graduates of the same major. Also, there is an interactional effect between majors and cognitive skills to explain earnings. The findings shed light on the importance of considering cognitive skills when assessing the relationship between college majors and labour market outcomes.