A product of prestige?: “Race unknown” and competitive admissions in the United States

Policy researchers have difficulty understanding stratification in enrollment in US higher education when race and ethnicity data are plagued by missing values. Students who decline to ethnoracially self-identify become part of a “race unknown” reporting category. In undergraduate enrollment, “race unknown” students are not randomly distributed and are highest among the most selective universities. In this “Policy Research Note,” we investigate these patterns at US law schools to understand if they are driven by selectivity. We find that the most competitive law schools, on average, report 8% of their students are race unknown, double the rate of other law schools. We argue that race unknown enrollment cannot be ignored when studying ethnoracial enrollments in higher education because it varies systematically by institutional type and may mask actual rates of ethnoracial diversity. We posit that the race unknown category is likely produced by a combination of individual and institutional processes. Individual applicants may resist disclosing their ethnoracial identities, perhaps because of a perceived threat to their chances of admission. Additionally, institutional actors may willfully ignore race unknown students (not following up upon enrollment) because this category may enhance the appearance of campus diversity by diminishing the percentages of students in over-represented ethnoracial groups. In this way, high rates of race unknown students may be a product of prestigious and highly competitive educational processes.

Reconceptualising fair access to highly academically selective universities

The higher education regulator for England has set challenging new widening access targets requiring universities to rethink how merit is judged in admissions. Universities are being encouraged to move away from the traditional meritocratic equality of opportunity model of fair access, which holds that university places should go to the most highly qualified candidates irrespective of social background, in accordance with the principles of procedural fairness. Instead, they are being asked to move towards what we term the meritocratic equity of opportunity model, which holds that prospective students’ qualifications should be judged in light of the socioeconomic circumstances in which these were obtained to enhance distributive fairness, a practice known in the UK as contextualised admissions. In this paper, we critically discuss the theoretical underpinnings of these two competing perspectives on fair access and review the existing empirical evidence base, drawing together for the first time insights from our ESRC and Nuffield Foundation funded studies of fair access to highly academically selective universities in England. We argue that reconceptualising fair access in terms of distributive fairness rather than procedural fairness offers a more socially just set of principles on which to allocate valuable but scarce places at the most academically selective universities in England, unless or until such time as the vertical stratification of higher education institutions is reduced or eliminated entirely.

Union Reform, Performance Pay, and New Teacher Supply: Evidence from Wisconsin's Act 10

This study examines the impact of performance pay on teacher selection. I exploit a shift toward performance pay in Wisconsin induced by the enactment of Act 10, which gave school districts autonomy to redesign their compensation schemes. Following the law, half of Wisconsin school districts eliminated salary schedules and started negotiating pay with individual teachers based on performance. Comparing the quantity of teaching degrees in Wisconsin institutions before and after Act 10, and relative to those in similar states, I find that Act 10 led to a 20 percent increase in teaching degrees. This effect was entirely driven by selective universities.

CO-EDUCATION VERSUS SINGLE-GENDER EDUCATION: INFLUENCE OF DIFFERENT EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM ON THE STUDENT SELF-ESTEEM, CONFIDENCE LEVEL, AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT IN PAKISTAN

Different education sectors are playing active role in the development of students like performance, self-esteem, and confidence. To fulfill the study purpose, the researcher used 2 scales (Rosen Berg self-esteem and Dr. John confidence level scale) and collected the data from the students of both of the specified educational settings. The students of universities of the district Faisalabad were the study population, and students of 3 selective universities were the sample of the study. After data collection, the researcher applied one-way ANOVA to check the impact of all variables on students’ academic achievement. The study results showed no significant impact of both types of education on students’ academic achievement but it has a significant impact on their confidence level and the self-esteem. At the end of the paper, it was recommended that teachers need to focus on student confidence level and self-esteem to build their good personalities leading to the higher academic achievements.

Can role models help encourage young people to apply to (selective) universities? Evidence from a large scale English field experiment

Under-participation in selective universities lowers social mobility in England, the United States, and elsewhere. English universities have standardized tuition costs, and strongly heterogeneous graduate earnings. Attending a selective university is therefore strongly incentivized, yet under-participation is extensive. The British Government sent 11,104 “nudge” letters to school students whose prior attainment made them competitive for entry into selective universities, urging them to consider that option. We evaluate this RCT and find it effective at raising the number of students who apply to, and accept offers from, selective universities. We find the cost to be low relative to outcomes.

Comentario: Excepcionalidad meritocrática y política de acción afirmativa en la educación superior en Chile

We have written this commentary on the work “Meritocratic Exceptionality and Affirmative Action Policy in Higher Education in Chile” with the aim of complementing it with the background and points of view of people who have been rowing against the tide for 30 years, in favor of access for students who, during their secondary education, took full advantage of the opportunities they found in their socio-educational contexts, but whose doors are closed to them by the walls of “selective” universities. We hope, with hope, that the points of view of the authors of the work plus ours will be a contribution to the dismantling of the current social segregation of our country, which generates so much structural violence.

No such thing as a free lunch: widening participation in English higher education for those on free school meals

Government policy is committed to increasing the representation of students that come from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds at selective universities in England. However, access and participation of this group remain stratified and unequal. Focusing on free school meals as a proxy for socio-economic disadvantage, this article will examine how successful the Government has been in influencing 25 of the most selective universities in England to change their widening participation policies in relation to free school meal students. Drawing on the Stephen J. Ball conceptualisation of policy as text and policy as discourse, a macro-level policies were enacted at a micro-level. Findings indicate that the Government has had some success at influencing some local practices of the sampled institutions. However, universities have also deployed strategies that are based on established and dominant discourses to maintain their elite and selective position in society.