Connecting Both Sides of the “Admission Desk”: Contextual Data from High School Counselors and Factors Influencing Its Quality

Abstract

In recent years, selective colleges have embraced the use of contextual data in their holistic assessments of undergraduate applicants. Background data about students’ school and home environments can enable admission officers to make more equitable admission decisions. While emerging research has examined quantitative contextual measures and their impacts on the decision-making of admission professionals, the more qualitative components in the application portfolio have garnered less attention. This dissertation examines two of these qualitative sources of contextual data—high school profiles (HSPs) and recommendation letters—supplied by high school counselors. It also considers counselor caseload size as a key mediator of HSP and letter quality. The first paper delves into HSPs, which are the primary source of school contextual data in the application file. Incorporating a content analysis of HSPs and interviews with admission officers, the study investigates misalignment between what admission officers seek in these documents and the information HSPs contain. I found that most profiles in my sample lacked critical qualitative information about high schools, and that higher-resourced schools were the most likely to include these key qualitative data points. The second paper investigates counselor recommendation letters, which are a source of both applicant and school contextual data. Using natural language processing and machine learning techniques, I examined 1.5 million counselor recommendation letters to identify the types of information they include. For a subset of this corpus, I also quantified the degree of text reuse within counselor, showing that letter similarity was related to measures of school resources. The third paper considers caseload size, an organizational condition that shapes counselors’ capacity to produce high-quality HSPs and recommendation letters. This historical analysis explores the origins of the recommendation that schools employ one counselor for every 250 students. I leveraged institutional theory to argue why the recommendation has persisted in the policy discourse despite little evidence underlying it. Collectively, the studies underscore the double-edged sword of colleges’ reliance on contextual data: contextual data can promote equity in admission officers’ holistic assessments of marginalized applicants, but only if systems and resources are in place that facilitate high school counselors supplying that data.