You are Admitted! Early Evidence on Enrollment from Idaho’s Direct Admissions System

Abstract

In 2015, Idaho adopted the nation’s first direct admissions system and proactively admitted all high school graduates to a set of public institutions. This reimagination of the admissions process may reduce barriers to students’ enrollment and improve access across geographic and socioeconomic contexts by removing many human capital, informational, and financial barriers in the college search and application process. Despite a lack of evidence on the efficacy of direct admissions systems, the policy has already been proposed or implemented in four other states. Using synthetic control methods, we estimate the first causal impacts of direct admissions on institutional enrollment outcomes. We find early evidence that direct admissions increased first-time undergraduate enrollments by 4–8% (50–100 students per campus on average) and in-state levels by approximately 8–15% (80–140 students) but had minimal-to-no impacts on the enrollment of Pell-eligible students. These enrollment gains were concentrated among 2-year, open-access institutions. We discuss these findings in relation to state contexts and policy design given the emergence of literature highlighting the varied efficacy of similar college access policies.

A Sociological Analysis of Structural Racism in “Student List” Lead Generation Products

“…Similar to the model of preapproving customers in consumer markets, direct admissions policies make proactive admissions offers to high school students that meet admissions criteria. Odle and Delaney (2022) found that adoption by Idaho increased first-time undergraduate enrollment at the campus level and the state level. Five states have adopted direct admissions or are considering adoption (Odle & Delaney, 2022).…”

“…Odle and Delaney (2022) found that adoption by Idaho increased first-time undergraduate enrollment at the campus level and the state level. Five states have adopted direct admissions or are considering adoption (Odle & Delaney, 2022). Brown and Burns (2023) state that identifying eligible students and their contact information is a significant barrier to equality of opportunity in direct admissions.…”

Documenting Their Decisions: How Undocumented Students Enroll and Persist in College

“…Ultimately, high schools are a key place to help resolve these differences, as efforts to reach undocumented students must begin earlier in the application process to help them choose the postsecondary environment that will maximize their chances of success. Alternately, colleges or states can engage in more targeted policies that simplify and provide clarity to admissions processes, which have been shown to increase enrollment (Dynarski et al, 2021; Odle & Delaney, 2022). It is a smaller point, but these results also highlight the importance of better microdata, as we provide a more complicated narrative of differences in CSU and UC college enrollment rather than one that simply examines the choice between 2- and 4-year colleges.…”

The Effect of the Uniform Bar Examination on Admissions, Diversity, Affordability, and Employment Across Law Schools in the United States

“…The point estimates from our main results are substantively unchanged, although the standard errors for these lagged estimates are large, given fewer posttreatment years. For all estimates, we cluster standard errors at the state (treatment) level to control serial correlation in outcomes (Cameron & Miller, 2015), particularly given the salience of state policy and geography in shaping outcomes for students and institutions (González Canché, 2014, 2017, 2018; Odle, 2021; Odle & Delaney, 2022; Odle & Monday, 2021).…”