There is substantial evidence of the relationship between household income and achievement on the standardized tests often required for college admissions, yet little comparable inquiry considers the essays typically required of applicants to selective U.S. colleges and universities. We used a corpus of 240,000 admission essays submitted by 60,000 applicants to the University of California in November 2016 to measure relationships between the content of admission essays, self-reported household income, and SAT scores. We quantified essay content using correlated topic modeling and essay style using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We found that essay content and style had stronger correlations to self-reported household income than did SAT scores and that essays explained much of the variance in SAT scores. This analysis shows that essays encode similar information as the SAT and suggests that college admission protocols should attend to how social class is encoded in non-numerical components of applications.

Stratification in college application materials is a contentious topic in social science and national discourse in the United States. This line of research has also started to use computational methods to consider qualitative materials, such as personal statements and letters of recommendation. Despite the prominence of this topic, fewer studies have considered a fairly common academic pathway: transferring. Approximately 40\% of all college students in the United States transfer schools at least once. One quirk of the system is that students from community colleges are applying for the same spots for students already enrolled in four year schools and trying to transfer. How might these different institutional experiences and the transfer application itself reflect social stratification? We leverage a dataset of 20,532 transfer admissions essays submitted to the University of California system to describe how transfer applicants are stratified linguistically, culturally, and narratively with respect to academic pathways and essay prompts. These results show different types of stratification that can emerge in educational processes intended to equalize opportunity and how combining computational and human reading might illuminate them.

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Variation in college application materials related to social stratification is a contentious topic in social science and national discourse in the United States. This line of research has also started to use computational methods to consider qualitative materials, such as personal statements and letters of recommendation. Despite the prominence of this topic, fewer studies have considered a fairly common academic pathway: transferring. Approximately 40% of all college students in the US transfer schools at least once. One quirk of the system is that students from community colleges are applying for the same spots for students already enrolled in four year schools and trying to transfer. How might different aspects the transfer application itself correlate with institutional stratification and make students more or less distinguishable? We use a dataset of 20,532 transfer admissions essays submitted to the University of California system to describe how transfer applicants vary linguistically, culturally, and narratively with respect to academic pathways and essay prompts. Using a variety of methods for computational text analysis and qualitative coding, we find that essays written by community college students tend to be distinct from those written by university students. However, the strength and character of these results changed with the writing prompt provided to applicants. These results show how some forms of stratification, such as the type of school students attend, inform educational processes intended to equalize opportunity and how combining computational and human reading might illuminate these patterns. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42001-022-00185-5.

How does gender inform initial academic commitments and narrative self-presentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields during the college application process? Analyzing 60,000 undergraduate applications to the University of California, the authors surface two key findings. First, extant gender segregation of academic disciplines also manifests in intended major choice. Additionally, gender and SAT Math scores together strongly predict intent to major in biology and engineering, the most popular and gender-segregated majors. Second, using natural language processing, the investigators find that author gender is more predictive of essay topics written by prospective engineers than prospective biologists. Specifically, women intending to major in engineering write about essay topics that signal their gender identity to a greater degree than women intending to major in biology, perhaps to mitigate gender-transgressive academic commitments. The authors subsequently argue that prescriptive and proscriptive ideas about men and women’s academic choices remain highly salient in a moment of imagining future academic and professional selves.