Education 3.0

Education 3.0 is the confluence of known, effective throughputs in teaching and learning due to changed inputs and desired changes to output across higher education. From increasingly diverse student populations to the need for critical thinking by all, education has fundamentally changed. Practitioners must leverage technologies to scale learning and meet demands by families for more flexible, lifelong learning options. Gone are the days when student bodies had more on-campus, residential, homogeneity, as well as small cohorts from selective admissions. Such changes now require architects of learning to consider the efficacy of various teaching and assessment methods in promoting actual learning versus short-term memorization, as well as how to use technology to do all of this at scale. From neuroscience to learning psychology to education technology, there is an impressive body of research around authentic learning, yet most faculty are largely unaware of this scholarship, seeing instruction dominated by tradition rather than effectiveness.

High Impact Practices and Professional School Acceptance in Health Science Concentrations

Graduate-level professional health care programs have a highly selective admissions process. Applicants can distinguish themselves by participating in High Impact Practices (HIPs) to enhance their undergraduate experience and academic and professional success. The variables analyzed in this study included acceptance, grade point average (GPA), minor attainment, items from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), and HIPs. Results of the analysis indicate a significant positive association between professional school acceptance and GPA, minor attainment, and capstone course completion. Data analysis suggests specific HIPs correlate with admission to desired graduate programs, and implications for advising students with this goal are discussed.

College Quality and Attendance Patterns: A Long-Run View

We construct a time series of college attendance patterns for the United States and document a reversal: family background was a better predictor of college attendance before World War II, but academic ability was afterward. We construct a model of college choice that explains this reversal. The model’s central mechanism is that an exogenous surge of college attendance leads better colleges to be oversubscribed, institute selective admissions, and raise their quality relative to their peers, as in Hoxby (2009). Rising quality at better colleges attracts high-ability students, while falling quality at the remaining colleges dissuades low-ability students, generating the reversal. (JEL I23, J12, N32)

A Descriptive Analysis of Cream Skimming and Pushout in Choice versus Traditional Public Schools

One of the controversies surrounding charter schools is whether these schools may either “cream skim” high-performing students from traditional public schools or “pushout” low-achieving students or students with discipline histories, leaving traditional public schools to educate the most challenging students. In this study, we use longitudinal statewide data from Tennessee and North Carolina and linear probability models to examine whether there is evidence consistent with these selective enrollment practices. Because school choice programs managed by districts (magnet and open enrollment programs) have a similar ability to cream skim and pushout students, we also examine these outcomes for these programs. Across the various school choice programs, magnet schools have the most evidence of cream skimming, but this might be expected as they often have selective admissions. For charter schools, we do not find patterns in the data consistent with cream skimming, but we do find evidence consistent with pushout behaviors based on discipline records. Finally, some have raised concerns that students may be pushed out near accountability test dates, but our results suggest no evidence consistent with this claim.

Application Essays and the Performance of Merit in US Selective Admissions

What sustains the broad conception of merit that organizes academic gatekeeping in the United States? While prior analysts have offered “top-down” explanations of academic leaders expanding criteria of merit to accommodate institutional self-interests, we identify a “bottom-up” mechanism: the application essay. Integrating insights from several strands of sociological theory, we posit that the essays required by schools with selective admissions sustain merit’s breadth by enlisting young people (and their families, teachers, and consultants) in collaborative performances of what might be considered meritorious. Analyzing essay prompts and utilizing human readings and statistical analyses of 220,062 essays contributed by 55,016 applicants to a public US university system, we find circumscribed genre expectations and class-correlated patterns of self-presentation but also substantial range in what the university and its applicants invoke as evidence to support competitive bids for admission. Our work provides a novel explanation of an elaborate but opaque evaluation protocol and surfaces a paradoxically inclusive component of an otherwise fiercely exclusionary evaluative regime.

Targeted Medical School Admissions: A Strategic Process for Meeting Our Social Mission

Background and Objectives: Increased medical school class sizes and new medical schools have not addressed the workforce inadequacies in primary care or underserved settings. While there is substantial evidence that student attributes predict practice specialty and location, little is known about how schools use these factors in admissions processes. We sought to describe admissions strategies to recruit students likely to practice in primary care or underserved settings. Methods: We surveyed admissions personnel at US allopathic and osteopathic medical schools in 2018 about targeted admissions strategies aimed at recruitment and selection of students likely to practice rurally, in urban underserved areas, or in primary care Results: One hundred thirty-three of 185 (71.8%) US medical schools responded. Respondents reported targeted admissions strategies as follows: rural, 69.2%; urban underserved, 67.4%; and primary care, 45.3%. Nearly 90% reported some type of recruitment outreach to 4-year universities, but much less to community colleges. Student characteristics used to identify those likely to practice in targeted areas were largely evidence-based. Strategies to select students varied widely. Conclusions: Most responding US medical schools reported a targeted process to recruit and select students likely to practice in rural, urban underserved, or primary care settings, indicating widespread awareness of workforce challenges. This study also demonstrates varying approaches to and allocation of resources toward admissions targeting, especially the application and interviewing processes. Understanding how schools identify and admit students likely to practice in these fields is a first step in identifying best practices for selective admissions focused on addressing workforce gaps.

Equidad en el acceso y la graduación en la Educación Superior: Reflexiones desde el Cono Sur

The analysis of the equity of mass higher education systems in Latin America indicates how important it is to ensure that young people in the lower income sectors can study and obtain a degree. In this sense, the Southern Cone region constitutes an interesting case study to analyze the results in terms of access and graduation through the implementation of selective admissions policies, institutional diversification and privatization (Chile); or free and unrestricted access in the public sector in a diversified institutional environment (Argentina) or low institutional diversification (Uruguay). The comparative analysis of these countries reveals the relevance of analyzing not only the public and institutional policies of access and sources of funding and the evolution of the indicators regarding access and graduation in each case, but also of studying what occurs in terms of institutional differentiation, its association with social stratification and prestige allocation. Thus, the indicators show improvements over time, but in institutional contexts that maintain certain patterns of social inequality.

Pemodelan Support Vector Machine Data Tidak Seimbang Keberhasilan Studi Mahasiswa Magister IPB

Bogor Agricultural University Postgraduate School (SPs-IPB) can maintain its reputation by applying a more selective admissions system. This research predicts the success of student using Support Vector Machine (SVM) modeling by considering the characteristics and educational background of the students. But there is an imbalance of data class. SVM modeling on unbalanced data produces poor performance with a sensitivity value of 0.00%. Unbalanced data handling using Sythetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) succeeded in improving SVM classification performance in classifying unsuccessful students. Based on accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity with the default cut off, the exact type of SVM to model student success is SVM RBF. When using the optimum cut-off value from each type of SVM, the sensitivity value can be improved again. SVM RBF still gives the best result when using cut off 0.6. The final model that will be used to predict the success of the SPs-IPB student is obtained from SVM RBF modeling with cut off 0.6 using the entire data that has been through the SMOTE stage.

American Higher Education and Income Inequality

This paper demonstrates that increasing income inequality can contribute to the trends we see in American higher education, particularly in the selective, private nonprofit and public sectors. Given these institutions’ selective admissions and commitment to socioeconomic diversity, the paper demonstrates how increasing income inequality leads to higher tuition, costs, and financial aid. A numerical example is presented that estimates how much lower tuition, spending (costs), and financial aid would have been if household incomes in the United States had grown by the same aggregate amount between 1971 and 2009, but with no increase in income inequality. The policy implications include the government addressing rising income inequality directly or changing the incentives facing higher education and will be of interest to those concerned with the rising cost of higher education and issues of access and affordability.