“They’re Outside of the Process”: How Admissions Officers Maintain Inequality When Evaluating Course Rigor Through Holistic Admissions

Abstract

Admissions officers practicing holistic admissions judge students’ course taking based on what was available to them, yet how representatives learn about students’ high school context and subsequently evaluate students’ course rigor within it remains underexamined. Using signaling theory and effectively maintaining the inequality framework, we leveraged interview data with college admissions representatives to investigate how they construct their understandings of high- versus low-resourced schools and how they evaluate course taking within each context. We found that admissions officers were less likely to understand low-resourced schools’ course offerings, had different approaches for determining how students made the most of their opportunities, and held deficit-oriented beliefs about them. These findings provide insights into the holistic admissions process and the ways it disadvantages low-resourced schools and students.