Systemic Fairness and College Admissions

References

• Alvero A, Arthurs N, Antonio AL, Domingue BW, Gebre-Medhin B, Giebel S, Stevens ML (2020) AI and holistic review: Informing human reading in college admissions. Proc. AAAI/ACM Conf. AI, Ethics, Soc. (Association for Computing Machinery, New York), 200–206.Google Scholar
• Attali Y, Burstein J (2004) Automated essay scoring with e-rater® v. 2.0. ETS Res. Rep. Ser. 2004(2):i–21.Google Scholar
• Baesens B, Setiono R, Mues C, Vanthienen J (2003) Using neural network rule extraction and decision tables for credit-risk evaluation. Management Sci. 49(3):312–329.Link, Google Scholar
• Bartlett R, Morse A, Stanton R, Wallace N (2022) Consumer-lending discrimination in the fintech era. J. Financial Econom. 143(1):30–56.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Bastedo MN, Bowman NA, Glasener KM, Kelly JL (2018) What are we talking about when we talk about holistic review? Selective college admissions and its effects on low-SES students. J. Higher Ed. 89(5):782–805.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Belasco AS, Rosinger KO, Hearn JC (2015) The test-optional movement at America’s selective liberal arts colleges: A boon for equity or something else? Ed. Eval. Policy Anal. 37(2):206–223.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Berk R (2017) An impact assessment of machine learning risk forecasts on parole board decisions and recidivism. J. Experiment. Criminology 13(2):193–216.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Bowman NA, Bastedo MN (2018) What role may admissions office diversity and practices play in equitable decisions? Res. Higher Ed. 59:430–447.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Boyce M (2019) Understanding how college admissions professionals define “holistic application review”: A grounded theory study. PhD thesis, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA.Google Scholar
• Buchmann C, Condron DJ, Roscigno VJ (2010) Shadow education, American style: Test preparation, the SAT and college enrollment. Soc. Forces 89(2):435–461.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Burke L (2020) The death and life of an admissions algorithm. Accessed April 17, 2024, https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2020/12/14/u-texas-will-stop-using-controversial-algorithm-evaluate-phd.Google Scholar
• Cameron SV, Heckman JJ (2001) The dynamics of educational attainment for black, Hispanic, and white males. J. Political Econom. 109(3):455–499.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Cancian M (1998) Race-based versus class-based affirmative action in college admissions. J. Policy Anal. Management 17(1):94–105.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Carey K (2023) Can college diversity survive the end of affirmative action? Vox (June 29), https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/6/29/23767756/affirmative-action-college-admissions-race-sffa-ruling.Google Scholar
• Claybourn C (2022) How colleges choose which students to admit. U.S. News & World Report (August 16), https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-colleges-choose-which-students-to-admit.Google Scholar
• College Board (2024) SAT user percentiles. Accessed June 30, 2024, https://research.collegeboard.org/reports/sat-suite/understanding-scores/sat.Google Scholar
• College Transitions (2025) 50 most applied-to colleges—2025. Accessed January 31, 2025, https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/most-applied-to-colleges/.Google Scholar
• D’Amour A, Srinivasan H, Atwood J, Baljekar P, Sculley D, Halpern Y (2020) Fairness is not static: Deeper understanding of long term fairness via simulation studies. Proc. 2020 Conf. Fairness, Accountability, Transparency (Association for Computing Machinery, New York), 525–534.Google Scholar
• De-Arteaga M, Feuerriegel S, Saar-Tsechansky M (2022) Algorithmic fairness in business analytics: Directions for research and practice. Production Oper. Management 31(10):3749–3770.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Devlin J, Chang MW, Lee K, Toutanova K (2019) BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. Proc. 2019 Conf. North Amer. Chapter Assoc. Comput. Linguistics: Human Language Tech. (Association for Computational Linguistics, Singapore), 4171–4186.Google Scholar
• Dickson LM (2006) Does ending affirmative action in college admissions lower the percent of minority students applying to college? Econom. Ed. Rev. 25(1):109–119.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Dwork C, Hardt M, Pitassi T, Reingold O, Zemel R (2012) Fairness through awareness. Proc. Third Innovations Theoret. Comput. Sci. Conf. (Association for Computing Machinery, New York), 214–226.Google Scholar
• Edelman B, Luca M, Svirsky D (2017) Racial discrimination in the sharing economy: Evidence from a field experiment. Amer. Econom. J.: Applied Econom. 9(2):1–22.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Element451 (2025) AI & admissions: Making fast, fair decisions in higher ed. Accessed July 8, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwdmBltNWtM.Google Scholar
• Gilbert JE (2006) Applications quest: Computing diversity. Comm. ACM 49(3):99–104.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Green AR, Carney DR, Pallin DJ, Ngo LH, Raymond KL, Iezzoni LI, Banaji MR (2007) Implicit bias among physicians and its prediction of thrombolysis decisions for black and white patients. J. General Internal Medicine 22(9):1231–1238.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Hardt M, Price E, Srebro N (2016) Equality of opportunity in supervised learning. Lee D, Sugiyama M, Luxburg U, Guyon I, Garnett R, eds. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 29 (Curran Associates, Red Hook, NY).Google Scholar
• Hartecolis A (2018) Harvard rated Asian-American applicants lower on personality traits, suit says. New York Times (June 15), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollment-applicants.html.Google Scholar
• Hoekstra M (2009) The effect of attending the flagship state university on earnings: A discontinuity-based approach. Rev. Econom. Statist. 91(4):717–724.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Hossler D, Chung E, Kwon J, Lucido J, Bowman N, Bastedo M (2019) A study of the use of nonacademic factors in holistic undergraduate admissions reviews. J. Higher Ed. 90(6):833–859.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Hoxby CM (2009) The changing selectivity of American colleges. J. Econom. Perspect. 23(4):95–118.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Korn M (2018) Some elite colleges review an application in 8 minutes (or less). Wall Street Journal (January 31), https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-elite-colleges-review-an-application-in-8-minutes-or-less-1517400001.Google Scholar
• Leonhardt D (2023) Study of elite college admissions data suggests being very rich is its own qualification. New York Times (July 24), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/24/upshot/ivy-league-elite-college-admissions.html.Google Scholar
• Liptak A (2023) Supreme court rejects affirmative action at Harvard and U.N.C. New York Times (June 29), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/us/politics/supreme-court-admissions-affirmative-action-harvard-unc.html.Google Scholar
• Lira B, Gardner M, Quirk A, Stone C, Rao A, Ungar L, Hutt S, Hickman L, D’Mello SK, Duckworth AL (2023) Using artificial intelligence to assess personal qualities in college admissions. Sci. Adv. 9(41):eadg9405.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Long MC (2004) Race and college admissions: An alternative to affirmative action? Rev. Econom. Statist. 86(4):1020–1033.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Mehrabi N, Morstatter F, Saxena N, Lerman K, Galstyan A (2021) A survey on bias and fairness in machine learning. ACM Comput. Surveys 54(6):115. Google Scholar
• Miller CC (2015) Can an algorithm hire better than a human? New York Times (June 26), https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/26/upshot/can-an-algorithm-hire-better-than-a-human.html.Google Scholar
• Mullainathan S, Obermeyer Z (2021) On the inequity of predicting A while hoping for B. AEA Papers Proc. 111:37–42. Crossref, Google Scholar
• Muratov E, Lewis M, Fourches D, Tropsha A, Cox WC (2017) Computer-assisted decision support for student admissions based on their predicted academic performance. Amer. J. Pharmaceutical Ed. 81(3):46.Crossref, Google Scholar
• National Center for Education Statistics (2023) Undergraduate enrollment. Accessed November 24, 2024, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cha/undergrad-enrollment.Google Scholar
• Pennebaker JW, Chung CK, Frazee J, Lavergne GM, Beaver DI (2014) When small words foretell academic success: The case of college admissions essays. PLoS One 9(12):e115844.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Pessach D, Shmueli E (2022) A review on fairness in machine learning. ACM Comput. Surveys 55(3):51. Google Scholar
• Posselt JR, Jaquette O, Bielby R, Bastedo MN (2012) Access without equity: Longitudinal analyses of institutional stratification by race and ethnicity, 1972–2004. Amer. Ed. Res. J. 49(6):1074–1111.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Radford A, Narasimhan K, Salimans T, Sutskever I (2018) Improving language understanding by generative pre-training.Google Scholar
• Ray A, Padmanabhan B, Bouayad L (2023) Systemic fairness. Preprint, submitted April 14, https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06901.Google Scholar
• Ray A, Padmanabhan B, Bouayad L (2026) Systemic fairness and college admissions. https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2023.0523.cd, https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2023.0523.Google Scholar
• Roshanaei M (2024) Towards best practices for mitigating artificial intelligence implicit bias in shaping diversity, inclusion and equity in higher education. Ed. Inform. Tech. 29(14):18959–18984.Google Scholar
• Rosinger KO, Sarita Ford K, Choi J (2021) The role of selective college admissions criteria in interrupting or reproducing racial and economic inequities. J. Higher Ed. 92(1):31–55.Crossref, Google Scholar
• Staudaher S, Lee J, Soleimani F (2020) Predicting applicant admission status for Georgia Tech’s online Master’s in Analytics program. Proc. Seventh ACM Conf. Learn. @ Scale (Association for Computing Machinery, New York), 309–312.Google Scholar
• Sukumar PT, Metoyer R, He S (2018) Making a pecan pie: Understanding and supporting the holistic review process in admissions. Proc. ACM Human-Comput. Interaction 2(CSCW):169.Google Scholar
• U.S. Department of Education (2024) College scorecard. Accessed November 24, 2024, https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/.Google Scholar
• U.S. News & World Report (2023a) Best national universities. Accessed May 25, 2024, https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities.Google Scholar
• U.S. News & World Report (2023b) Colleges with the lowest acceptance rates. Accessed June 29, 2024, https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate.Google Scholar
• Waldman A, Green EL (2018) Charlottesville’s other Jim Crow legacy: Separate and unequal education. Accessed August 15, 2023, https://www.propublica.org/article/charlottesville-other-jim-crow-legacy-separate-and-unequal-education.Google Scholar
• Waters A, Miikkulainen R (2014) GRADE: Machine learning support for graduate admissions. AI Magazine 35(1):64–64.Crossref, Google Scholar