Are university admissions academically fair?

Working paper

High-profile universities often face public criticism for undermining academic merit and promoting social elitism/engineering through their admissions-process. In this paper, we develop an empirical test for whether access to selective universities is meritocratic. We assume that students who are better-qualified on standard observable indicators would on average, but not necessarily with certainty, appear academically stronger to admission-tutors based on characteristics observable to them b...

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Authors: Bhattacharya, D; Kanaya, S; Stevens, M

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: University of Oxford Publisher's website
• Series: Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
• Publication date: 2012-06-01
• Paper number: 608
• Keywords: conditional stochastic dominance; university admissions; threshold-crossing model; unobserved heterogeneity; marginal admit; economic efficiency; partial identification; affirmative action