Admitting Students in Context: Field Experiments on Information Dashboards in College Admissions

In this paper, we address whether the provision of contextual information about where students live and learn has the potential to expand postsecondary opportunities to students from disadvantaged neighborhoods and high schools. To examine this question, we describe the results of field experiments with admissions officers working in eight universities who re-read real applications from previous admissions cycles with a dashboard of contextual data about the applicant’s neighborhood and high school. In this low-stakes context, admissions officers from institutions utilizing holistic admissions practices were more likely to recommend admitting low-SES applicants when provided with contextual data. The experiment also primed admissions readers to treat students from highly disadvantaged high school and neighborhood contexts more favorably relative to the results of the high-stakes official read, even when the dashboard was not shown to study participants. The results of this experiment suggest that contextualized data can improve equity in admissions, but fidelity to holistic admissions practices is crucial.