Equity

Why the SAT is a Poor Fit for America’s Public Universities by Saul Geiser. CSHE.2.25 (September 2025)

Saul Geiser
2025

This report responds to recent announcements by Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and other institutions reinstating the SAT or ACT for admission. Widely publicized after aNew York Timesarticle and analysis by Harvard’s Opportunity Insights group, these announcement rest on two claims: that standardized tests outperform high school grades in predicting college success and that they may enhance diversity in admissions. Both claims falter...

New ROPS Report Challenges Return to SAT

September 30, 2025

SAT FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New UC Berkeley Report Challenges Return to SAT: Calls for Public Universities to Double Down on Public Mission

Berkeley, CA – September 30, 2025 — As a number of elite “Ivy-Plus” universities have reinstated SAT and ACT requirements, a new research report by Saul Geiser, Senior Associate at UC Berkeley’s Center...

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xr218pj

New UC Berkeley Report Challenges Return to SAT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New UC Berkeley Report Challenges Return to SAT: Calls for Public Universities to Double Down on Public Mission

Berkeley, CA – September 30, 2025 — As a number of elite “Ivy-Plus” universities have reinstated SAT and ACT requirements, a new research report by Saul Geiser, Senior Associate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, argues that the tests are a poor fit for the mission of America’s public universities.

The report, Why the SAT is a Poor Fit for America’s Public Universities, responds to a wave of high-...

Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline Since 1900

Zachary Bleemer
Sarah Quincy
2025

Going to college has consistently conferred a large wage premium. We show that the relative premium received by lower-income Americans has halved since 1960. We decompose this steady rise in ‘collegiate regressivity’ using dozens of survey and administrative datasets documenting 1900–2020 wage premiums and the composition and value-added of collegiate institutions and majors. Three factors explain 80 percent of collegiate regressivity’s growth. First, the teachingoriented public universities where lower-income students are concentrated have relatively declined in funding, retention, and...

Crisis by Design: Student Housing and the Hidden Cost of Higher Education by Shanshan Jiang-Brittan, CSHE 1.25 (July 2025)

Shanshan Jiang-Brittan
2025

The student housing crisis surrounding large public universities remains underexamined in education scholarship. This paper fills a gap in literature by analyzing how PurposeBuilt Student Accommodation (PBSA) adds to the hidden cost of attending these institutions and examines the broader implications of commodifying studenthood for students, local communities, and higher education itself....

New ROPS Paper Uncovers Student Housing Crisis as a Hidden Cost of Higher Education

July 15, 2025

BERKELEY, CA – The Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) today announced the release of a new paper in the Research and Occasional Paper Series (ROPS) that critically examines the escalating student housing crisis. The paper, titled "Crisis by Design," delves into how the proliferation of Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) and the financialization of student housing are reshaping access and equity in higher education.

Authored by Dr. Shanshan Jiang-Brittan, the paper asserts that fast enrollment growths, coupled with insufficient...

Faculty Affiliate Gina Ann Garcia Weighs in on the HSI Lawsuit

June 13, 2025

"Garcia believes that regardless of whether the lawsuit is successful, it’s already done damage to HSIs by dragging them—and enrollment-based MSIs in general—into the country’s political skirmishes over diversity, equity and inclusion.

She worries that students are the ones who will suffer if HSIs no longer receive dedicated funding.

HSIs 'are often underresourced institutions,” she said. “They’re institutions that are struggling to serve a large population of minoritized students, of students of color, of low-income students, of first-gen students. We’re not talking about...

Superstars And Rookies Of The Year: Faculty Hiring Practices In The Postmodern Age

Mary Burgan
2005

Hiring new colleagues is a matter that engages individual faculty members intensely, for peer control of admission to the professoriate has been a highly successful source of academic quality in American higher education. “Super Stars and Rookies of the Year” analyzes the fixation on research acclaim as a negative version of academic hiring practices which has become embedded within the academic psyche. This fixation tends to be aroused by the rituals of recruitment and retention that take place on all campuses. But when recruitment becomes an exercise in what some economists have...

Minority Undergraduate Programs Intended to Increase Participation in Biomedical Careers

Anne MacLachlan
2012

This article reviews a selection of undergraduate programs intended to increase successful minority participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors, potentially leading to biomedical careers. The object is to examine their structure, consider how well they address the issues of the target population, and assess the extent to which they have met/meet their goals. As a means of conducting this review, the first step is to examine the concepts used as the building blocks for program design. These concepts are found in a shared, yet often undefined, vocabulary...

NORM-REFERENCED TESTS AND RACE-BLIND ADMISSIONS: The Case for Eliminating the SAT and ACT at the University of California by Saul Geiser, UC Berkeley CSHE 15.17 (December 2017)

Saul Geiser
2017

Of all college admission criteria, scores on nationally normed tests like the SAT and ACT are most affected by the socioeconomic background of the student. The effect of socioeconomic background on test scores has grown substantially at University of California over the past two decades, and tests have become more of a barrier to admission of disadvantaged students. In 1994, socioeconomic background factors—family income, parents’ education, and race/ethnicity—accounted for 25 percent of the variation in test scores among California high school graduates who applied to UC. By 2011, they...