Related papers: Assessing the Potential Impact of a Nationwide Cla…
This survey article provides insights regarding the future of affirmative action by analyzing the implementation methods and the empirical evidence on the use of placement quotas in the Brazilian higher education system. All federal…
We examine the effects of an affirmative action policy at an elite Brazilian university that reserved 45 percent of admission slots for Black and low-income students. We find that marginally-admitted students who enrolled through the…
Each year, selective American colleges sort through tens of thousands of applications to identify a first-year class that displays both academic merit and diversity. In the 2023-2024 admissions cycle, these colleges faced unprecedented…
We study a two-stage model, in which students are 1) admitted to college on the basis of an entrance exam which is a noisy signal about their qualifications (type), and then 2) those students who were admitted to college can be hired by an…
We consider the problem of designing affirmative action policies for selecting the top-k candidates from a pool of applicants. We assume that for each candidate we have socio-demographic attributes and a series of variables that serve as…
In this paper, we study university admissions under a centralized system that uses grades and standardized test scores to match applicants to university programs. We consider affirmative action policies that seek to increase the number of…
We study the problem of selecting the top-k candidates from a pool of applicants, where each candidate is associated with a score indicating his/her aptitude. Depending on the specific scenario, such as job search or college admissions,…
There is debate over whether Asian American students are admitted to selective colleges and universities at lower rates than white students with similar academic qualifications. However, there have been few empirical investigations of this…
We study search, evaluation, and selection of candidates of unknown quality for a position. We examine the effects of "soft" affirmative action policies increasing the relative percentage of minority candidates in the candidate pool. We…
This article offers a critical response to the preprint by Matheus et al. (2025), which evaluates the academic performance of students admitted through different entry routes at Sao Paulo State University. Although the dataset compiled by…
This paper examines the interplay between desegregation, institutional bias, and individual behavior in education. Using a game-theoretic model that considers race-heterogeneous social incentives, the study investigates the effects of…
Critical decisions in hiring, college admissions, and credit lending are guided by predictions made in the presence of uncertainty. While uncertainty imparts errors across all demographic groups, this paper shows that the types of errors…
Many U.S. colleges now use test-optional admissions. A frequent claim is that by not seeing standardized test scores, a college can admit a student body it prefers, say with more diversity. But how can observing less information improve…
We have previously described the reformed introductory physics course, Collaborative Learning through Active Sense-Making in Physics (CLASP), for bioscience students at a large public research one university (Original University) and…
Whether and how race is used in selective admissions remains a central question in higher education and civil rights law. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the Supreme Court held that race-based affirmative action in…
What happens if selective colleges change their admission policies? We study this question by analyzing the world's first implementation of nationally centralized meritocratic admissions in the early twentieth century. We find a persistent…
Many STEM degrees require passing an introductory physics course. Physics courses often have high failure rates that may disproportionately harm students who are marginalized by racism, sexism, and classism. We examined the associations…
Problem definition: Traditionally, New York City's top 8 public schools have selected candidates solely based on their scores in the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). These scores are known to be impacted by socioeconomic…
For many students, placement into developmental education becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Placing college students into developmental education significantly negatively impacts student attainment, student probability of passing, and…
Since 2018, France's centralized higher education platform, Parcoursup, has implemented quotas for scholarship recipients, with program-specific thresholds based on the applicants' composition. Using difference-in-differences methods, I…