Using an Index of Admission Obstacles with Constrained Optimization to Increase the Diversity of College Classes

ABSTRACT

Today, postsecondary institutions in the US typically wish to enroll entering classes that are both academically qualified and diverse. Although the definition of diversity varies from school to school, the challenge is essentially the same: How can academic objectives be combined with goals that involve the composition of the entering class? Many schools have a commitment to facilitating access for under-represented minorities or low-income applicants, or for members of nearby communities. Incorporating these goals while maintaining academic standards can be challenging.

Acknowledgments

We thank Brent Bridgeman, John Mazzeo, and Rochelle Michel for their comments and Abby Jacobs, Jessica Howell, Kevin Morris, and Greg Perfetto for the information they provided about College Board research.

Notes

¹ To comply with Institute of Education Sciences data security requirements, all sample sizes are rounded to the nearest ten in our description of the ELS analysis. No sampling weights were used in the ELS analyses; therefore, results cannot be generalized to high school seniors of 2004. See Zwick (2017) for details.

² We also constructed a revised version of the AOI, called the AOI-R, which does consider race. To compute the AOI-R, we added one point to the AOI score for applicants who were American Indian, Black, or Hispanic. Analyses based on the AOI-R are described in Zwick (2020).