The Role of Student High School and Neighborhood Information in College Admissions

• In Event: Higher Education Admissions in a Post–Supreme Court Decision Era

Abstract

While some admission measures can be independently useful, there are other admission measures that derive their greatest value in the contextualization they provide for other non-academic and academic factors (Hossler et al., 2019). One example of a measure like this is information from the College Board’s Landscape™ tool. Landscape is a free resource for enrollment management professionals that provides consistent information about a student’s neighborhood and high school to help colleges and universities thoughtfully consider other student information in context during the application and scholarship review process (Howell, Hurwitz, Imlay, & Perfetto, 2023).
Landscape includes neighborhood and high school percentiles at the: (1) neighborhood level, defined by a student’s census tract, and (2) high school level, defined by the census tracts of college-bound seniors at a high school (College Board, 2019). Applicants from the same census tract share the same neighborhood data and indicators; applicants from the same high school share the same high school data and indicators. These indicators are College attendance, crime, education level, household structure, housing stability, and median family income. These 6 indicators are averaged and presented on a 1—100 scale to provide a Neighborhood Average and a High School Average. A higher value on the 1—100 scale indicates a higher level of challenge related to educational opportunities and outcomes.
This study will demonstrate how the nature and meaning of one non-academic admission measure, extracurricular activity involvement, and one academic admission measure, high school grade point average (HSGPA), changes within the contextual consideration of a student’s neighborhood and high school challenge level information from Landscape.
Employing differential prediction residual analyses, we will examine the average overprediction and underprediction of first-year grade point average (FYGPA) in college, by extracurricular activity involvement and separately, HSGPA, within Landscape challenge quintiles. We will study this with students in the fall 2021 entering college cohort, across more than 100 four-year institutions. Residual analyses can show how particular admission measures function differently by subgroups – in this case subgroups based on Landscape challenge information. While FYGPA is an imperfect measure of college success, it provides a consistent and known metric for considering the differential impact of Landscape challenge level on the academic and non-academic admission measures of interest here. This study will illustrate how certain non-academic admission measures can not only serve their own general evaluative purposes but can more meaningfully provide contextual information to improve the use of other submitted application aspects. This work builds on an earlier study that demonstrated Landscape information moderates the meaning of HSGPA when predicting retention outcomes for academic advising (Westrick, Young, Shaw, & Shmueli, 2020).
Results from this study can contribute to our more nuanced collective understanding of holistic review in college admissions (Coleman & Keith, 2018; Hossler et al., 2019) and inform ways to admit and retain diverse student bodies without the consideration of race/ethnicity (Saul, 2023), given the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in higher education.

Authors

• Emily J. Shaw, The College Board

• Paul A. Westrick, College Board

• Jessica Marini, The College Board