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Keyholding or gatekeeping: managing the contradictions between market pressures and equity imperatives in the modern racialized college admissions office
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Keyholding or gatekeeping: managing the contradictions between market pressures and equity imperatives in the modern racialized college admissions office
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Content
Keyholding or Gatekeeping: Managing the Contradictions Between Market
Pressures and Equity Imperatives in the Modern Racialized College Admissions Office
Steve Desir
Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
A dissertation submitted to the faculty
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Education
December 2022
© Copyright by Steve Desir 2022
All Rights Reserved
The Committee for Steve Desir certifies the approval of this Dissertation
Estela Mara Bensimon
Shaun Harper
Julie R. Posselt, Committee Chair
Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
2022
iv
Abstract
Off-campus recruitment is a crucial element of the college enrollment process for admission
offices across the United States. In highly selective college admission offices throughout the
country, college admission professionals develop recruitment plans that are designed to
maximize the enrollment of their “ideal applicants” in the first-year class. There has been
relatively little empirical research exploring how highly selective college admission offices make
decisions about which high schools they will visit during recruitment season. In my quest to
learn more about how admission officers approached this decision-making process, this study
was designed to explore: how college admission offices constructed admission officer roles, the
ways college admission offices framed and talked about diversity, and how admission officers
understood their roles and developed their travel schedules. Guided by the theory of social
mechanisms, institutional logics, and the theory of racialized organizations, I discovered that
admission offices and the enrollment management professionals within them were—year to year
and day to day—constantly managing the tension between market and equity logics. These
tensions could be seen structurally in the discourses within admission officer job descriptions
and were also experienced by admission officers in the execution of their duties. In many ways
when we talk about logics in college admissions, what we are discussing is how organizational
routines naturalize inequality, diminish the agency of groups, and decouple commitments to
equity from everyday practice.
v
Acknowledgements
In “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin (2008) noted that individuals in society should
be taught that they do not “have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration,
any given policy, any given morality; that [they have] the right and the necessity to examine
everything” (Baldwin, 2008, p. 19). As a young person, my educational journey as the son of
Haitian immigrants began with my mother challenging me to examine everything, and for that, I
am eternally grateful. I also want to thank my godmother Marie Placide who was one of my very
first teachers. I would not be the person I am today without her love, guidance, and support.
I would like to take a moment and express my sincere thanks to the faculty who took time
out of their busy schedules to participate on my dissertation committee. I would not have made it
across the finish line without the unwavering support of Dr. Julie Posselt, who was patient with
me as I navigated the pandemic and numerous family issues. Thank you for always challenging
me to embrace Black scholars and speak in my authentic voice. As a student at Rossier, I had the
opportunity to learn from and with Dr. Estela Bensimon, who strengthened me as a scholar and
practitioner in ways that I could have never imagined. Thank you for believing in me and
challenging me to find my voice as an equity-minded professional. Lastly, I want to thank Dr.
Harper, who has known me since my NYU days. You have been an inspiration, and I have
learned so much from you over the years. Thank you for always challenging me to think about
ways that I can contribute to the student affairs community as a scholar. You have played a
critical role in my development as a practitioner, scholar, researcher, and educator. I would also
like to take this opportunity to thank my research participants and admission professionals who
made this study possible. I have learned so much about the challenging work that you do each
and every day at your institutions.
vi
During my time at USC, I have made lasting relationships with members of the Posselt
Research Team (PRT) and the Rossier community. I am grateful to my PRT family Dr. Cynthia
Villareal, Dr. Theresa Hernandez, Dr. Román Liera, Dr. Aireale Rodgers, and Dr. Deborah
Southern, for always checking in on me. You have made my experience at USC that much richer.
I would also like to thank my Center for Urban Education extended family members Jordan,
Adrian, Esmeralda, and Paloma for always creating a welcoming and affirming space for me at
USC. I would also like to thank my USC classmates Mabel, Dom, and Soso who have become
my second family in Los Angeles. I am eternally grateful for your guidance and for always
taking the time to make sure I celebrate the small wins.
As a first-generation college student, this journey was made possible by the community
that supported me. I would like to thank my family and friends, who were always there when I
needed them. I could not have done this without each and every one of you. While there are too
many of you to name, please know that I am truly indebted to you for your constant love and
support throughout the years. Last and certainly not least, as a man of faith, I would like to take
this opportunity to acknowledge the faith community that has prayed with and for me through
this journey. Your unwavering support has strengthened me through many of the difficult times I
experienced on this journey.
vii
Table of Contents
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... v
List of Tables ................................................................................................................................... x
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ xi
Chapter One: Introduction .............................................................................................................. 1
High School Visits in Enrollment Management ................................................................. 2
The Significance of High School Visits as an Admission’s Recruitment Strategy ............. 4
The Role of High School Visits in Maintaining Inequality ................................................ 6
Perspectives on the Persistent Underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and Low-Income
Students ............................................................................................................................... 8
Plan for the Dissertation .................................................................................................... 11
Chapter Two: Literature Review and Conceptual Framework ..................................................... 12
A Brief History of College Admission Recruitment Practices .......................................... 12
College Choice and Institutional Information Networks .................................................. 15
Social Capital and College Destinations ........................................................................... 23
Diversity of Admissions Office Staff ................................................................................ 26
Conceptual Framework ..................................................................................................... 28
Institutional Logics ........................................................................................................... 31
Racialized Organizations .................................................................................................. 39
Summary and Research Questions .................................................................................... 42
Chapter Three: Methodology ........................................................................................................ 44
Sampling Strategy for Discourse Analysis ....................................................................... 46
viii
Data Collection ................................................................................................................. 47
Data Analysis .................................................................................................................... 51
Limitations ........................................................................................................................ 53
Positionality ...................................................................................................................... 54
Chapter Four: Constructing Inequality and the Admission Officer Role ..................................... 56
Imaging the College Admissions Office ........................................................................... 60
Setting the Stage: Role and Purpose of Off-Campus Recruitment Activities ................... 62
Data-Driven Decision-Making .......................................................................................... 71
Framing Equity and Diversity ........................................................................................... 73
Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 81
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 86
Chapter Five: Inhabiting Market and Equity Logics .................................................................... 88
Off-Campus Recruitment and the College Admissions Interaction Order ....................... 90
Role of Institutional Context ............................................................................................. 95
Market Logics and the Development of Controlling Images ............................................ 97
Framing Diversity in College Admissions ...................................................................... 106
Equity Logics ................................................................................................................... 111
Envisioning a Different Future ....................................................................................... 115
Discussion ....................................................................................................................... 117
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 120
Chapter Six: Conclusion and Implications ................................................................................. 122
Summary of Findings ...................................................................................................... 126
Synthesis ......................................................................................................................... 132
ix
Implications for Improving Admissions Practice and Research ..................................... 134
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 143
References ................................................................................................................................... 146
Appendix A: Interview Protocol ................................................................................................. 180
Appendix B: Admission Office Website Review Protocol ......................................................... 184
Appendix C: Participant Information Sheet ................................................................................ 185
Appendix D: Recruitment Email ................................................................................................ 186
x
List of Tables
Table 1: Ideal Types of University Admissions Logics ................................................................ 39
Table 2: Frequency of Key Discourses in the Data ....................................................................... 59
xi
List of Figures
Figure 1: Revised Litten (1982) Student Choice Model ............................................................... 21
Figure 2: College Admissions Recruitment Hierarchal Activity Structure ................................. 132
1
Chapter One: Introduction
Each year there are observable differences in the enrollment rates of low-income, Black,
and Latinx high school graduates in highly selective colleges and universities. In today’s higher
education marketplace, Black and Latinx students are approximately 33% of the college-age
population, yet they account for only 14% of the student body at the most selective colleges and
universities in the United States (Ashkenas et al., 2018). Similarly, while Pell grant recipients
account for 32% of undergraduates across the United States, less than 20% of the undergraduate
student body at the most selective colleges and universities in the United States are Pell-eligible
(Baum et al., 2017; Carnevale & Van Der Werf, 2017).
In recent years, there has been increasing literature on the persistent underrepresentation
of Black, Latinx, and low-income students in highly selective colleges and universities (Baker et
al., 2018; Holland, 2014; Posselt et al., 2012). In one study, utilizing data from the Integrated
Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), Baker et al. (2018) demonstrated that increases
in college enrollment for Black, Latinx, and low-income students over the past three decades
have primarily been concentrated at non-selective and open-access institutions. This research has
shown that enrollment selectivity gaps have been steadily increasing over the past three decades.
Posselt et al. (2012), in another study, which analyzed the enrollment patterns at highly selective
institutions, found that the student body of the universities studied were often stratified by
socioeconomic status within and across racial groups.
The term highly selective colleges and university is often used to describe colleges or
universities with a selectivity rating of “most competitive” or “highly competitive” in Barron’s
Profiles of American Colleges. These colleges educate approximately 8% of all undergraduate
students in the United States (Goodman, 2013). They tout ever-increasing levels of diversity and
2
suggest that they have made greater efforts to recruit students from high schools that serve
Black, Latinx, and low-income students (Fernandes, 2017). Unfortunately, research has shown
that overall Black, Latinx, and low-income students are underrepresented in highly selective
colleges and universities (Ashkenas et al., 2018; Baum et al., 2017; Carnevale & Van Der Werf,
2017; DeSilver, 2014).
The persistent racial and socioeconomic stratification of highly selective institutions has
led to increased interest in understanding the application and enrollment behavior of low-income,
Black, and Latinx students. While previous research studies have shared valuable insights about
how students make decisions about which colleges to attend (Cabrera & La Nasa, 2000; Holland,
2019; Hoxby & Avery, 2013; Iloh, 2018; Nurnberg et al., 2012; Perna, 2006), very few studies
have explored the relationship between institutional behavior and the initial choices students
make about where to apply. Much of what we know about the enrollment patterns in highly
selective colleges is based upon empirical studies that investigate the individual college choices
of Black, Latinx, and low-income students (Baker et al., 2018; Posselt et al., 2012). However,
there are multiple stages in the college choice process where institutions make decisions that
ultimately impact the enrollment prospects of students from minoritized communities (Holland,
2014; Hoxby & Avery, 2013). One important, but understudied institutional decision is which
high schools’ admissions offices choose to visit during recruitment season.
High School Visits in Enrollment Management
The high school visit is a routine organizational practice that is strategically utilized by
admission departments to meet their college’s enrollment goals and objectives (Karabel, 2005a;
Selingo, 2020). During these visits colleges present a carefully curated organizational image that
is designed to ensure that prospective applicants form positive impressions of the university and
3
are able to distinguish them from their competitors (Stensaker, 2015). Roche (2020) in his
research about organizational image and attractiveness, noted that:
It could be inferred that the image formed by individuals about an organization
depends on the information each individual has about the organization, the way
the individual picked up the information, the personalized way of classifying the
information, [and] the insight of the connection between those pieces of information and
those already stored in their memory. (p. 26)
How individual colleges craft their organizational image and target prospective students is an
important line of inquiry because these practices tell us much about the types of students colleges
believe are the most desirable and admissible.
For many colleges and universities, the utility of the high school visit is derived from its
ability to shape prospective student behaviors. In fact, in a 2017 Ruffalo Noel Levitz report,
universities reported that approximately 22% of their enrollees were students who attended a
high school that was visited by a college admissions officer. Similarly, Human Capital Research,
a data consulting firm, in an analysis of the applicant pool of a selective college, found that 75%
of the applicants came from 18% of the high schools represented in the pool (Selingo, 2020).
These findings demonstrate that the makeup of the college applicant pool is primarily a function
of the relationship between high schools and colleges. While the high school visit is just one
component of the college admissions process, differential access to it plays an important role in
sustaining and reproducing the inequality present in higher education.
Each year college and university admission offices must make decisions about which of
the 26,727 public high schools in the United States they will visit during admissions travel
season (NCES, 2019). These decisions are a promising prospect for research because of their
4
structuring effect on the racial and socioeconomic composition of a university’s applicant pool.
An admission officer’s decision to include or exclude a high school from their travel schedule
provides valuable insight about how organizational values, priorities, and tensions are given
meaning through practice.
The high school visit is—as journalist Jeffrey Selingo frames it—part of an admissions
process that is consistently engaged in recruiting and evaluating high schools rather than
individual students (2020). In his book Poison in the Ivy, Byrd (2017) argues that many
discussions of the college choice process are often predicated on the premise that students select
colleges, when in fact it is the college that utilizes their organizational habitus to select students.
Higher education scholar Pat McDonough (1997) uses the term organizational habitus to refer to
the “impact of a cultural group or social class on an individual’s behavior through an
intermediate organization, the high school” (p. 107).
The Significance of High School Visits as an Admission’s Recruitment Strategy
College admission offices devote significant time and financial resources to recruit
students. Ruffalo Noel Levitz (2018), in a survey of admission directors, found that the median
private university spends $2,357 and that the median public university spends $536 to recruit a
single student. According to the Handbook for the College Admissions Profession, the primary
objective of admission recruitment programs is to influence the application and enrollment
behavior of prospective students (Swann & Henderson, 1998). In Creating a Class, Stevens
(2007) posits that the reputation and quality of an applicant pool is highly dependent on a
college’s relationship with high schools. These relationships are most often developed through
visits university admission officers make to high schools throughout the United States.
5
The importance of high school visits—as a field-level admissions practice—can be seen
in the 2017 State of College Admissions Report, where approximately 55% of admission
directors indicated that high school visits were of considerable importance as a recruitment
strategy. The NACAC annual admission trends survey asked respondents to rate various
recruitment strategies on a Likert scale which ranged from considerable importance to no
importance. The only recruitment strategies to surpass high school visits in importance were
direct marketing activities via email and college websites. Each year admissions offices allocate
approximately 15% of their annual budgets to support admission officer travel to high schools
and college fairs (Ruffalo Noel Levitz, 2018). In 2018, high school visits were responsible for
providing approximately one in five enrollees in the incoming class of public and private four-
year institutions (Ruffalo Noel Levitz, 2018).
In the typical college admissions office, staff who develop travel schedules, review
quantitative metrics such as average SAT scores, family income, application history, and college-
going rates to predict the number of potential applicants that might come from a neighborhood or
community (MacMillan & Anderson, 2019; Selingo, 2020). In undergraduate admission offices
these metrics function as evaluative scripts which Posselt (2016) defines as shared narratives and
heuristics that individuals utilize to support their judgments. In recruitment planning, SAT
scores, family income, and historical enrollment trends are used to describe successful applicants
and become the criteria that are used to evaluate whether a particular high school is worthy of a
visit. The justification for the use of these metrics in college recruitment is explained by Matt
Lopez, assistant vice president of enrollment services at Arizona State University in a recent
interview with the Arizona Republic: “Recruitment is a really expensive business. And you have
to make decisions. So, if you can go back to a school, and they typically send you X
6
[applications], and you feel like you can get ... more, that’s where you go” (Leingang, 2019, para.
10).
Research on the impact of admission recruitment practices has found that interactions
with an admission office may improve the likelihood that a student will apply to a college that
has interacted with them (Howell et al., 2018; Hoxby & Turner, 2015; Ruffalo Noel Levitz,
2017). This is especially true for students that are traditionally underrepresented in higher
education (Holland, 2014; Hoxby & Turner, 2015). In an investigation into high school feeder
patterns, Wolniak and Engberg (2007) found that students who attended a high school that had an
established and robust connection to a college or university were more likely to apply, receive an
offer of acceptance, and ultimately enroll in a college with an existing partnership. Perna (2006)
demonstrated that postsecondary enrollment is positively correlated with the resources that
students are able to access through social networks at the school attended. Collectively, these
studies provide valuable insight about the role of admission recruitment practices in shaping the
opportunity structures available to Black, Latinx, and low-income students. These studies also
raise important questions about the values, beliefs, and institutional priorities that have led
admissions offices to systematically divest recruitment resources from communities that serve
predominantly Black, Latinx, and low-income students.
The Role of High School Visits in Maintaining Inequality
As an organizational practice, the high school visit has significant implications for equity
since it influences subsequent decisions students make in the college enrollment process. For
many Black, Latinx, and low-income students, the high school visit functions as what political
and social theorist Steven Lukes describes as a freedom-diminishing practice. Freedom
diminishing practices are organizational micro-mechanisms of power that “structur[e] the
7
available choices’’ and “narro[w] the ‘feasible set’—the range of significant options that are
available” to an individual (Lukes, 1986, p. 10). College admission offices exert this power vis-
a-vis the high school visit by diminishing the access to information that Black, Latinx, and low-
income students have about the selective college options available to them. For countless Black,
Latinx, and low-income students, high school visits are a crucial component of the college search
process because they provide an opportunity for admission counselors to share valuable
information about the financial resources available to support their transition into higher
education and also to familiarize them with the various components of the college application
process (Holland, 2019; Klein & Washburn, 2012; Lautz et al., 2005; Stensaker, 2015).
As is the case with so many standard operating practices in organizations, current patterns
in high school visits uphold patterns of racial and socioeconomic stratification. In a 2019
analysis of 5,000 high school visits in Arizona, the Arizona Republic found that high schools that
had higher concentrations of low-income students were less likely to be visited by college
admission officers (Leingang, 2019). Previously, in a 2013 study, the Los Angeles Times found
that high schools in Los Angeles with higher proportions of Black, Latinx, and low-income
students had fewer visits from college admission officers than high schools in affluent
communities (Gordon, 2013). These investigations of high school visit programs highlight the
critical need for researchers to explore the connection between recruitment practices and the
persistent underrepresentation of students of color and low-income students in highly selective
colleges and universities. In a recent study of high school recruitment practices, for example,
Jaquette and Salazar (2018) found that admission officers, in their desire to improve admissions
yield, primarily recruit from well-resourced high schools in predominantly White communities.
8
Perspectives on the Persistent Underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and Low-Income
Students
Researchers examining the underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and low-income
students in highly selective colleges and universities have often focused on the behaviors of
students, families, and school counselors as reasons for the persistent selectivity gap present in
higher education (Hoxby & Turner, 2015; Nagaoka et al., 2013; Stephan, 2013; Thayer, 2000).
Perna’s (2006) work on college choice implies that students’ college application and enrollment
decisions are often based on their academic performance, financial status, familial support, and
knowledge of information about college application and enrollment processes.
Nationally, according to the American School Counselor Association (ASCA), the
counselor to student ratio in public schools is approximately 430:1 (American School Counselor
Association, 2020). Due to their increased caseloads, counselors in public schools spend on
average 22% of their time providing guidance and advice to students, compared to guidance
counselors in private schools who report that they spend 55% of their time advising students on
college (Clinedinst et al., 2017). One study by Bell et al. (2009) found that many high schools
did not have formal processes for providing information about financial aid or the process for
applying to college and to interested high school students.
One might also suppose that the underrepresentation of low-income and students of color
at selective colleges and universities can be attributed to the scarcity of high-ability students
produced by high schools that serve low-income, Black, and Latinx students. A fundamental
problem with this argument is that analysis of SAT and ACT performance data has shown that
there is a higher percentage of high-ability students from underrepresented groups in the national
population than are commonly found in the student bodies of selective colleges and universities
9
(Hill & Winston, 2010). While many admissions offices have made public declarations via their
mission statements and departmental websites that they desire to create “a diverse class”, many
of them have failed to actualize these goals.
One of the growing concerns with traditional perspectives on the underrepresentation of
Black, Latinx, and low-income students in highly selective colleges is the “invisibility of
practitioners” (Bensimon, 2007, p. 443) in much of the discourse about the college application
and enrollment outcomes of minoritized student groups. Yet those who do study practitioners and
the everyday work of enrollment management find they play crucial roles in shaping possibilities
for equity. For example, in their study on the enrollment decision-making process of Black male
undergraduates in highly selective colleges, Harper and Griffin (2010) found that college-
preparatory programs often served as facilitators of opportunity by providing access to valuable
information about the college application and enrollment process. The findings in this study
highlight the important role that practitioners can play in ensuring that higher education
continues to fulfill its mission to serve as an engine of opportunity for racially minoritized and
low-income students.
The overwhelming majority of research on college choice fails to account for the many
ways that colleges shape the interests and behavior of prospective students (Iloh & Tierney,
2013; Slay, 2017). The organizational priorities, values, and beliefs of admission offices play a
significant role in shaping the outreach of university admission offices, which conditions the
student application and the outcomes that follow (Dache-Gerbino et al., 2018; McMillan Cottom,
2017). These priorities, values, and beliefs serve as powerful frames of reference that facilitate
sense-making and provide the nomenclature that admissions staff use for their motivations, their
actions, and to define their sense of self and identity (Thornton et al., 2012). The institutional
10
logics framework provides an alternative lens that places the admission office and their
organizational practices at the center of the discussion about the selectivity gap at highly
selective colleges and universities.
Institutional logics are the system of socially constructed, cultural symbols, practices,
assumptions, beliefs, and values that guide the behavior of individuals and organizations in
society (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008). One of the central questions of this dissertation study is how
admissions offices manage the contradictions between market and equity logics when building a
class? In order to address this question, it is critically important to study the social construction
of outreach and recruitment priorities of college admission offices. As discussed above, much of
what we know about enrollment in highly selective colleges and universities is focused on the
actions of students, families, and the schools from which they came. The outreach and
recruitment decisions of admission offices shape the perception of the educational opportunities
available to students (Holland, 2019; Howell et al., 2018; Hoxby & Avery, 2013). In the college
search process, admission officers function as gatekeepers, and their decisions play a significant
role in expanding or constraining the college choices available to Black, Latinx, and low-income
students. In this dissertation, I studied the outreach and recruitment processes of highly selective
colleges and universities in the United States by exploring how college admission offices
constructed staff roles, how they deployed resources, how they articulated values, and most
importantly how staff understood and inhabited their roles as agents of their institutions.
including the role of the admissions officer and the thinking that contributes to their work.
Through an analysis of interviews and university documents, I explored how university outreach
and recruitment activities contribute to the racial and socioeconomic stratification of higher
education.
11
Plan for the Dissertation
In Chapter 2, I provide a brief overview of the literature and a conceptual framework. The
literature review includes perspectives on the history of bias in college admissions in order to
situate recruitment in its historical context, as well as literature on college choice and
organizational routines. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the literature and conceptual
framework are drawn from education, sociology, psychology, and critical race studies. The
methodological approach, data collection, and data analysis procedures are outlined in Chapter 3.
Findings are presented in two chapters. First, in Chapter 4, I explore how admission offices
structure recruitment routines through a discourse analysis of admission officer job descriptions.
The responsibilities outlined in the admission officer job descriptions become the basis for how
admission officers think about, process, and make meaning of their recruitment work in college
admissions. Chapter 5 outlines the decision-making process that admission officers use to select
the high schools that they use to visit high schools during recruitment season. Finally in Chapter
6, I discuss key themes from the study and provide implications for practice and future research.
12
Chapter Two: Literature Review and Conceptual Framework
In this chapter, I present the literature and conceptual framework that provides the
foundation for this study. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the history of college
admission recruitment practices, as well as literature on college choice, and institutional
information networks. This is followed by the conceptual framework that informed the data
collection and analysis for this study. The goal of this chapter is to provide a historical account of
college admission recruitment practices and expand upon their theoretical underpinnings in an
effort to explore how the everyday choices and practices of university admission officers
reinforce inequalities between students and communities.
A Brief History of College Admission Recruitment Practices
The development of formal relationships between college admissions offices and high
schools dates as far back as 1870 when many elite colleges had relationships with feeder
secondary institutions and private preparatory schools (Kahlenberg, 2010; Thelin, 2011). In the
early 1900’s, as it is today, the student bodies for selective colleges were often drawn from
private boarding schools in local proximity (Thelin, 2011). Since, the majority of students came
from very few high schools, admission deans placed significant trust in the headmasters of
boarding schools to assess whether students were the right for a particular college. During this
period, there were relatively few admission standards; the acceptance of students was based
primarily on the recommendation of the principal of the feeder school (Karabel, 2005a; Synnott,
1979; Thelin, 2011). This process occurred until 1920 when Harvard, Princeton, and Yale shifted
away from admitting students exclusively based on academic criteria and began to include
assessments of their character (Karabel, 2005a). In the description for the initial development of
character assessments, Karabel (2005a) explained that “the cornerstones were discretion and
13
opacity - discretion so that gatekeepers would be free to do what they wished and opacity so that
how they used their discretion would not be subject to public scrutiny” (p. 2). The vestiges of
these beliefs are still evident today, with students who attend private preparatory schools and
elite boarding schools receiving differential access to college information and resources (Gordon,
2013).
In the late 1950s Harvard set its sights on increasing the enrollment of Black students and
developed a targeted recruitment program in conjunction with the National Scholarship Service
and the Fund for Negro Students (Karabel, 2005a). This recruitment program was highly
successful and is where 50% of Harvard’s Black students learned about the college. While this
program was focused on recruiting Black students, this practice has evolved into organizations
like the Posse Foundation, Questbridge, Prep for Prep, and other community-based organizations
which aid admissions offices in identifying Black, Latinx, and low-income students for
admission. These programs, like their predecessor, exist outside of high schools and are often
focused on providing counseling and assistance that students who attend private secondary
schools would receive.
The emergence of recruitment practices focused on increasing the representation of
minoritized student groups at highly selective colleges and universities dates at least to 1961,
when Harvard formally established their affirmative action program (Karabel, 2005a; Stulberg &
Chen, 2014). The Cornell Opportunity Program and The University of Michigan’s Opportunity
Awards Program are other early examples of affirmative action programs developed in the 1960s
which recognized that in order to expand the enrollment of Black students, university admission
professionals would need to establish relationships with predominantly Black high schools in
their respective states (Stulberg & Chen, 2014). While Cornell and Michigan’s programs were
14
focused on Black students, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) developed the
Educational Opportunities Program in 1964 to “expand educational opportunities for
environmentally and economically disadvantaged young people, many from minority groups”
(Murphy as cited in Stulberg & Chen, 2014, p. 43). The Educational Opportunities Program
subsequently spread throughout the University of California system. The development of
affirmative action programs that devoted staff attention and recruitment resources to increasing
the representation of minoritized student populations demonstrates that higher-education
institutions are capable of, and possess the knowledge to, increase the enrollment of Black,
Latinx, and low-income students.
The impact of targeted recruitment and outreach programs on the enrollment of racially
minoritized students at highly selective colleges and universities during the 1960s can be seen in
the drastic increases in Black student enrollment at selective colleges and universities during the
latter half of that decade. For example, in 1969, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale admitted 224 Black
students, a 386% increase from the 58 students they admitted just 5 years before in 1964
(Karabel, 2005a). From 1964 to 1969, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale all hired their first Black
admissions staff members, who were often responsible for leading and coordinating recruitment
efforts that were designed to expand the number of Black students in their applicant pool
(Karabel, 2005a). In a conversation describing the impact of Civil Rights era recruitment
initiatives, the director of admissions at Yale stated that the increase of Black students from 1964
through 1969 could be “attributed to a great degree, to the activities of this special group” of
Black student recruiters who visited 1,000 high schools across the nation (Karabel, 2005b, p. 64).
15
College Choice and Institutional Information Networks
College knowledge is a critical component of the college choice process—and college
choice models–and research documents the lack of information about college application
processes and procedures in high schools where the majority of students are Black, Latinx, or
low-income (Cabrera & La Nasa, 2000; Ceja, 2006; DesJardins & Toutkoushian, 2005; Iloh,
2018; Perna, 2005). Differential access to college information has a significant impact on the
types of colleges that Black, Latinx, and low-income students apply to and enroll in (Cabrera &
La Nasa, 2000; Castleman & Goodman, 2018; Holland, 2019; Hoxby & Avery, 2013; Iloh,
2018). College admission officers through their outreach efforts can provide valuable guidance,
information, and support for students as they navigate complicated college application processes.
The seminal model of college choice (Hossler & Gallagher, 1987) proposed a three-stage
process that forms a starting point for the current study. In the predisposition phase, students
make determinations about their post-secondary plans. Subsequently, students who determine
that they wish to pursue higher education enter the search phase, in which they gather
information and formulate their choice set, a grouping of colleges that a student will submit
applications for. The last stage of the model is choice. During this stage, students make decisions
about which college they will attend. Hossler and Gallagher’s (1987) model presents the college
choice process as a series of developmental stages where students are continually gathering
information and assessing the college options available to them. Although the model provides
useful information for understanding how students develop aspirations and ultimately how they
make decisions about where to enroll, it neglects to account for how college admissions offices
impact the application and enrollment behavior of students.
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The multi-level model of college enrollment developed by Perna (2006) offers an
alternative perspective. Perna’s model indicates that college enrollment decisions are often
shaped by schools, higher education institutions, students and their families, and the larger
social, economic, and policy context. The first layer of the model, which draws from economic
human capital investment theories, is where most research on college choice is focused. This
layer of the model posits that college choice decisions are determined by considering the costs
and benefits of pursuing a degree and the chances of admission. Research in this domain often
focuses on the impact of the cost of attendance and the lack of information available to Black,
Latinx, and low-income students (Blackwell & Pinder, 2014; Holland, 2014; King, 1996). The
second layer of the model describes how a student’s school environment will shape the college
choice process. In the college admissions process, the rigor of school offerings and the
availability of access to school counselors are frequently cited as school resource issues that may
impede the enrollment of Black, Latinx, and low-income students. In the higher education layer
of the model, Perna describes how institutions shape college choice. Much of the research
conducted in this area has been focused on the effectiveness of university recruitment practices
(Cabrera & La Nasa, 2000). The fourth layer of the model recognizes the role of the policy
context in shaping student application and enrollment outcomes. Research in this area is often
focused on the impact of various public policies on student enrollment outcomes (Dynarski &
Scott-Clayton, 2013; Perna & Titus, 2004). While Perna’s expanded model of college choice
includes elements that account for the socio-cultural environment that shape student actions
during the college choice process, it is still primarily centered on the actions and activities of
students and the communities from which they came. Much of the research conducted utilizing
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Perna’s model diminishes the role of higher education institutions in shaping the behaviors,
actions, and beliefs of students, their families, and the schools that serve them.
Iloh (2018) advances an additional college choice model and posits that economic and
sociological approaches for studying college choice generally disregard how opportunity
structures such as information constrain students from considering all of the post-secondary
options available to them. Iloh (2018), given her research on non-selective colleges and
universities, argues that ecological approaches for studying college choice provide the
opportunity to consider how a student’s context shapes the college decision making process. In
this model, Iloh (2018) suggests that time, information, and opportunity are all essential factors
that influence the college choice process. The first element of the model is information which is
focused on student access to and the quality of information students utilize to make decisions
about college. Time is an additional component of the model, which recognizes that historical,
educational, and social events may influence an individual students’ decision-making and their
college journey. Opportunity, which draws heavily from ecological theories, is the third and final
factor of the model. This aspect of the model draws attention to how particular elements of the
student’s identity, familial, community, and educational context shape their beliefs and
perceptions of the types of colleges that are available and accessible to them. Iloh’s (2018) model
adds an essential perspective to the college choice literature and is exceptionally useful for
exploring the college choice process of students from marginalized communities.
Litten’s (1982) expanded model of the college selection process is an ideal framework for
examining the impact of college recruitment activities on the application and enrollment
behavior of students. Litten’s model was one of the first college choice models to devote a
significant portion of its focus on understanding the impact of college recruitment activities on
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student application and enrollment outcomes. Litten recognized that there was a need for
universities to assess the effectiveness of their recruitment activities when making outreach to
students who differed in terms of race, academic ability, parent education levels, and geography.
In this regard, Litten provided the foundation for college admission professionals and researchers
to interrogate college recruitment practices which, for the most part, were unquestioned and
unchanged since many of them were developed during the 1970s and 1980s (Hossler &
Bontrager, 2015).
Although Litten (1982) and Iloh’s (2018) models provide space for researchers to
envision how college recruitment activities influence application behavior, they both assume that
college recruitment practices are race-neutral. There have been relatively few studies or models
of college choice that have attempted to explore how racism and classism have shaped the
organizational identity and practices of admissions departments and the individuals that they
employ. In the early years of the profession, deans of admission were often responsible for
carrying out discriminatory recruitment and enrollment goals of university faculty and senior
leadership (Karabel, 2005a; Synnott, 1979). These goals were responsible for the development of
organizational practices that were intentionally designed to ensure the racial and socioeconomic
segregation of the student bodies of selective institutions across the United States (Karabel,
2005a; Synnott, 1979; Tough, 2019).
Considering the legacy of racism and classism in college admissions is crucial to
expanding our current understanding of admission recruitment practices in maintaining and
reproducing inequality in college admissions. Existing research in enrollment management often
describes changes in admissions office strategy as a response to emerging trends in student
application and enrollment behavior (Grawe, 2018). When in fact, the history of college
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admissions has shown that shifting institutional demands have led to the development of
organizational routines that have expanded or constrained the enrollment of students
(Kahlenberg, 2010, Karabel, 2005a; Synnott, 1979). The recruitment of legacies, the exclusion of
Jews, the expansion of the enrollment of Black and Mexican American students during the Civil
Rights era are all examples of ways that the enrollment patterns of student groups were shaped
by shifting institutional priorities (Karabel, 2005a; Synnott, 1979).
As such, there is a need for a college choice model that recognizes racism and classism as
social processes that are deeply embedded in the college choice process. A revision of Litten’s
(1982) model is presented in Figure 1. Figure 1 depicts college choice as a multi-phase process
that is influenced by the actions of colleges. In the revised model, college aspirations and
information-gathering are shaped by college actions. Additionally, in this version of the model,
recruitment activities such as the high school visit will shape student aspirations and,
subsequently, the information-gathering process.
Existing research on college recruitment practices has demonstrated that college
admission offices focus their recruitment activities on full pay students with high SAT scores
(Karabel, 2005a; Tough, 2019). Historically, the ideal student for highly selective institutions has
been wealthy white men (Karabel, 2005a). The revised model accounts for this through the
inclusion of an additional arrows which illustrate that college actions are also influenced by
student and high school characteristics. In Figure 1, the actions of admissions offices are
influenced by student characteristics such as race and family income and high school
characteristics such as SAT scores, family income, academic quality, and race.
Figure 1
Revised Litten (1982) Student Choice Model
Note. Adapted from “Different Strokes in the Applicant Pool,” by L. Litten, 1982, The Journal of Higher Education, 53, p. 388.
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Information Networks
Although traditionally underrepresented students often do not have access to the same
resources as their peers, community and school-based resources have been shown to level the
playing field (Cabrera & La Nasa, 2000). In an analysis of the college choice process, King
(1996) found that enrollment decisions could be impacted by the information and assistance
students received from college admission officers. The College Board’s (2011) commissioned
study on college counseling found that 60% of low-income students of color indicated that they
valued the assistance provided by university admissions representatives. The participants in the
study also indicated that they would have applied to a more selective college or university if a
representative had reached out to them. Overall, these studies highlight the need for researchers
to critically examine how admission recruitment practices might contribute to the persistent
underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and low-income students in highly selective colleges and
universities.
DesJardins et al.’s (2019) analysis of changes in student aspirations for college adds
valuable insight to the literature about college choice. Using longitudinal data from 31,532 high
school students in Indiana, the researchers examined how college aspirations evolved over time
as students acquired additional college knowledge and information. The authors developed a
panel data set and conducted logistic regressions to determine the impact of student
characteristics such as gender, ethnicity/race, school context, ability to pay and academic
performance on student aspirations to enroll in college. One important finding in this study is
that Black and low-income high school students were more likely to change their college
aspirations during high school when compared to their white and high-income peers. The study
also found positive associations between changes in high school GPA and the types of colleges
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students wish to attend, which signals that as students’ grades improve, they make changes to
their aspirations for college. Although these findings are specific to high school students in
Indiana, they demonstrate that students update their aspirations for college as they acquire new
information about their chances to be successful in higher education.
In a research study, on low-income high school students, Castleman and Goodman (2018)
found that students who received intensive college counseling were 10 percentage points more
likely to enroll in college in the fall immediately following high school graduation. This study
conducted a comparative data analysis of the college enrollment decisions and persistence rates
of Boston high school students and compared those results with a subset of 5,000 Boston Public
School students that participated in an intensive college counseling program offered by Bottom
Line, a Boston based non-profit organization. The researchers also found that students in the
treatment group were also more likely to persist into their second year of college. The findings in
this study illustrate the important role that counseling plays in influencing the enrollment
decisions of first-generation and low-income students.
The Expanding College Opportunities project was yet another research study that further
demonstrates the impact of college knowledge on the college application and enrollment
decisions of Black, Latinx, and low-income students (Hoxby & Turner, 2015). In this 2013 study,
researchers provided high school students with fee waivers and personalized information about
colleges where their grades and standardized test scores would qualify them for admission
(Hoxby & Turner, 2015). The participants in the Expanding College Opportunities project shifted
their application and enrollment behavior to more selective institutions as a result of the
information and fee waivers provided by the research team (Hoxby & Turner, 2015). The
findings in the Expanding College Opportunities project demonstrate the important role that
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personalized information and procedural assistance can play in aiding Black, Latinx, and low-
income students in successfully navigating the various steps in the college application process.
The provision of such individualized information is one reason that high school visits are a
crucial routine to enrollment outcomes—in these visits, there is an opportunity for information
sharing and rapport development that goes beyond what a college or university might be able to
convey on their websites or through other channels.
Numerous studies have illustrated the tightly coupled relationship between social capital
and college-application behavior. Perna (2006) demonstrated that postsecondary enrollment is
positively correlated with the resources that students are able to access through social networks
at the school attended. Jaquette and Salazar (2018) in an analysis of the recruitment travel
schedules of over 200 colleges, found that admission officers primarily recruit from well-
resourced high schools in White, affluent communities, in their desire to reach enrollment
targets. Collectively, these studies suggest that the declining enrollment rates of Black and Latinx
students in highly selective colleges and universities might partially be attributed to the
information networks that postsecondary institutions make available to students from Black,
Latinx, and low-income communities.
Social Capital and College Destinations
A considerable amount of literature has been published on social capital in schools and its
role in student college outcomes. Social capital is defined as “the sum of the resources, actual or
virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more
or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” (Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1992, p. 119). These “networks of people and community resources” (Yosso, 2005, p.
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89) serve as a resource that Black, Latinx, and low-income students can access to provide
information and emotional support to navigate the college search and application process.
College information as an example of social capital can be seen in Holland’s (2019) 2-
year qualitative study of 89 students at two racially and socioeconomically diverse high schools.
In this study, Holland (2019) found that differential access to college information and resources
had a significant impact on the postsecondary destination choices of students. Similarly, in a
study that interviewed of the college search process of 900 high school valedictorians in five
states, researchers found that student college-application decisions were often shaped by their
access to college information (Radford, 2013).
Wolniak and Engberg (2007) found that students who attended a high school that had an
established and strong connection to a college or university were more likely to attend that
college. The authors analyzed the application and financial aid records of 18,000 students at
eight private 4-year colleges. Regression analysis in the study found that White students from
affluent communities had higher mean feeder scale scores and were 20–30% more likely to
enroll at a particular college or university. This finding is consistent with other studies which
have also revealed that schools with existing partnerships and relationships are more likely to
gain access to information and resources necessary for success in the college application and
enrollment process (Bridwell-Mitchell, 2019; Stevens, 2007; Tsang, 2010). Collectively, these
studies illustrate the important role of high school and college partnerships in facilitating access
to selective colleges and universities for minoritized student groups. Current admission practices
that draw students from a small subset of networked high schools exacerbate unequal access to
highly selective institutions.
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Additional studies have considered the relationship between the application behavior of
low-income high school students and contact with a school guidance counselor (Bryan et al.,
2011). In a 2011 study, researchers analyzed data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002
and found that contact with a school counselor had a positive effect on the number of college
applications that were submitted by low-income students. This research confirms previous
findings and contributes to our general understanding of the important role that information and
college counseling play in the college search and enrollment process for first-generation and
low-income students. The lack of information and access to intensive college counseling often
serve as barriers between countless Black, Latinx, and low-income students and their college-
going aspirations.
Previous studies of the college admission process have often ignored the role of
admission offices in structuring the college opportunities available for racially minoritized and
low-income students. Organizations and their routines matter because they process and shape
opportunities for all who come through them—or at least aspire to them. As Ray (2019) argues,
“In isolation, individual prejudice and racial animus may matter little; but when put into practice
in connection to organizational processes such as racialized tracking, job-typing, or exclusion
they help shape the larger racial order” (p. 2). Research in college admissions has called for
researchers to systematically study how the beliefs, practices, and values of admission officers
shape the recruitment and admission processes adopted by highly selective institutions (Bastedo
& Bowman, 2017; Slay, 2017). This is especially important since university admission practices
can reproduce social inequality in a number of ways (Blackburn & Prandy, 1997).
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Diversity of Admissions Office Staff
It is exceptionally challenging to understand the behavior of college admission offices
without first developing an understanding of who admission officers are, and how different
admission officers make use of the organizational tools, resources, and rules that are available to
them. Although higher education has attempted to diversify the faculty and student body, chief
admission officers are still predominantly white (McDonough & Robertson, 2012). According to
data collected by NACAC, only 24% of admission counselors and 18% of admission directors
identify as Black or Latinx (Hoover, 2019b). In a study on the impact of admission officer
diversity on admission decisions, a national sample of 311 admission officers participated in a
simulation where they reviewed three fictional applicant files (Bowman & Bastedo, 2018). The
team of researchers found that admission officers from minoritized backgrounds were more
likely to admit low-SES applicants. Female admission officers in the study provided more
favorable admission recommendations than their male counterparts. Admission officers of color,
on the other hand, were less likely to admit the high achieving, high SES applicant when
compared to their White admission colleagues. This finding illustrates the agency admission
officers have in their roles and raises questions about how admission officers from minoritized
backgrounds make use of different logics to achieve their own personal goals and objectives.
Bowman and Bastedo (2018) also found that working at one’s alma mater and additional
years of work experience in admissions led to less favorable admission recommendations for
low-SES applicants. It may be that admission officers who are employed at their alma mater or
have multiple years of work experience are more likely to be “deeply embedded in a particular
logic through identification and socialization” (Thornton et al., 2012, p. 84) and will therefore
make use of knowledge about who is an ideal applicant based on their previous experiences as
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members of the campus community. Collectively, these findings highlight the relative importance
of improving the diversity of admissions staff. A major problem with the experimental methods
that have been utilized in prior studies of the decision-making process of university admission
officers is that the results often fail to uncover the why of their judgments—that is, logics of
action leveraged by admission officers as they carry out organizational routines. Research is
needed to add nuance and depth to our understanding of what takes place in the black box that is
college admissions, and how key decisions such as priorities for the recruitment travel schedule,
are made.
To summarize, college outreach activities play an essential role in shaping student
dispositions about the types of colleges available to them (Howell et al., 2018; Hoxby & Avery,
2013; Iloh, 2018; Slay, 2017). In addition, social capital acquired from schools, community, and
familial sources play a significant role in shaping the college choice process for Black, Latinx,
and low-income students (Castleman & Goodman, 2018; Hoxby & Turner, 2015). Presently,
however, information asymmetry regarding admissibility, cost of attendance, and the policies and
procedures for submitting college applications have contributed to the persistent
underrepresentation of minoritized students in highly selective colleges and universities
(Holland, 2019; Iloh, 2018; Jaquette & Salazar, 2018; Slay, 2017).
Although there is significant literature on college choice and the underrepresentation of
Black, Latinx, and low-income students in higher education, there is still much to be understood
about the role of selective colleges and universities in facilitating the racial and socioeconomic
stratification of higher education (Holland, 2019; Iloh, 2018; Litten, 1982; Perna, 2006; Posselt
et al., 2012). The dominant theories on college choice are primarily focused on the behaviors of
students, families, and school counselors; they often fail to analyze the ways in which the actions
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and choices made by students, families, and school counselors are shaped by the outreach and
recruitment activities of colleges and universities (Hoxby & Avery, 2013; Nagaoka et al., 2013;
Stephan, 2013; Thayer, 2000). It seems clear that if they are to reduce unequal enrollments, that
colleges and universities must do more, and do differently, when it comes to outreach and
recruitment in high schools with large numbers of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students. This
includes in-person visits where personalized information can be shared. Higher education
scholars have devoted minimal attention to exploring how the values, priorities, beliefs, and
actions of admission officers and the departments they represent contribute to the reproduction of
inequality. Yet one critically important and understudied outreach and recruitment practice is the
high school visit. This study will address this gap by linking college choice literature with
institutional theory to investigate how racial and socioeconomic stratification occur in college
outreach and recruitment activities.
Conceptual Framework
The focus on the individual enrollment decisions of minoritized students in much of the
research on college admissions has significantly limited our ability to critically explore
organizational behavior and how issues of race and class shape the organizational decision-
making of selective college admission offices. Wooten and Couloute (2017) argue that
“organizations are racially stratified social actors” (p. 2) that are influenced by a set of racial
logics that guide the strategic decision-making of organizations. A primary objective of my
dissertation has been to understand how the individual recruitment practices of admission
officers contribute to the persistent underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and low-income
students. And, relatedly, how the social construction of the admissions officer role, within the
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context of modern enrollment management practices introduced in Chapter 1, forces them to
balance multiple priorities when making decisions and enacting their role.
To this end, Gross’ (2009) pragmatist theory of social mechanisms is useful for
understanding how the collective enactment of practices across an organizational field
contributes to the production and reproduction of social inequality. For this reason, a theoretical
model that recognizes that organizational routines and individual professional practice are
learned through social experience is particularly helpful. Weber (2005) provides additional
support for the importance of studying the actions of individual actors when offering the
following:
This “supply-side” analysis of [means of action] shifts researchers’ focus from values and
choices to cultural resources, habits, skills, and styles. As each actor has at hand only a
bounded set of heterogeneous resources (concepts, actions, stories, and symbols) for
solving the diverse problems of everyday life. (p. 228)
The theory of social mechanisms is described using the following equation:
S = (A-P-H-R) (1)
Equation 1 suggests that in order to understand a social mechanism (S) we must first understand
the individual and collective actors (A), the problem situations they encounter (P), their socially
learned habits for action (H), and the responses and resources available to them (Gross, 2009, p.
368). According to Gross (2009), “the habits an actor is endowed with will affect the ways in
which she understands the significance of and uses the nonhuman resources at her disposal” (p.
370).
In college admission settings, recruitment activities have been developed over time to
address problems that admission staff have encountered in the execution of their duties. One
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common challenge that admission offices are constantly faced with is the expectation that they
will “enroll more students than last year, but also to make sure they are better in every
measurable way and want to pay more for their educational experience” (Basko, 2022). Gross’
theory of social mechanisms would support the assumption that how an individual admission
officer might come to respond to this challenge will be socially constructed by their local
admissions office. Job descriptions and the micro-practices outlined within them are cultural
artifacts that define and elaborate how admission officers define problems and leverage resources
to solve the problems they encounter as they execute their responsibilities (Harding, 2003).
Moreover, these artifacts are more than just utterances; they shape an actor’s professional
identity, values, and priorities (Harding, 2003). These documents play a critical role in shaping
how admission officers think, speak, and ultimately carry out their work as representatives of
their institutions.
In this study, my goals of understanding the rationales for action among, as well as the
responses and resources available to, admission officers required an exploration of the formal job
responsibilities outlined by college admission offices. I examined routine admission recruitment
practices, because social inequality is often produced and maintained by the passive participation
of individuals in organizations (Ray, 2019; Wooten & Couloute, 2017). The scholarship on
college admissions rarely explores the ways that the organizational routines of institutional
agents shape the racial and class stratification that is present in higher education.
The history of college admissions in the United States is full of racial and socioeconomic
discriminatory practices that were often developed during periods of extreme racial and
socioeconomic hostility (Kahlenberg, 2010; Karabel, 2005a). Many of these practices were
intentionally maintained and have reproduced selectivity gaps through a series of organizational
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practices that have become habituated as normal and accepted, despite their consequences. The
institutional logics perspective provides the opportunity to examine the social forces that shape
individual decisions and practices, including about which high schools to visit. In the next
section, I explore institutional logics because in various organizational settings logics shape
objectives, and through discourse they establish local meaning-making processes which provide
the coherence necessary for the coordination of the activity of admission officers.
Institutional Logics
The institutional logics perspective provides a comprehensive theoretical framework to
describe the organizing principles, practices, and symbols that shape admission officers’ behavior
and decision-making processes (Thornton et al., 2012). A key foundational principle of the
institutional logics perspective is that the interests, values, beliefs, and assumptions of
individuals and organizations are deeply embedded in an organization’s established ways of
justifying actions (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008). Social actors may reproduce or raise challenges to
dominant institutional logics. How logics are enacted and operationalized within an admissions
office can be seen in how problems are articulated, how individual admission officers respond to
the challenges they encounter, how they deploy resources, and how they organize activity. The
institutional logics framework—given its focus on both individual and organizational level
values and beliefs—therefore provides an alternative lens for researching the impact of college
recruitment activities on the selectivity gap in highly selective colleges and universities.
The institutional logics perspective expands on the traditional views of institutional
theory through its addition of vocabularies of practice (Thornton et al., 2012). This expansion
links the material aspects of institutions (structures, practices) with symbolic elements (ideation,
meaning). V ocabularies of practice are the theories, frames, narratives, and behaviors that serve
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as the foundation for the development of common language for sensemaking, decision-making,
and most importantly action (Thornton et al., 2012). V ocabularies of practice in college
admissions typically depict university outreach and recruitment practices as a race-neutral
process that is designed to help selective colleges and universities fill their seats in a first-year
class (Karabel, 2005a; Tough, 2019). This vocabulary of practice has been central in shaping the
formation of the theories, frames, and narratives that guide the behaviors of admission officers. I
will explore each of these three concepts.
Thornton et al. (2012) define theories as a set of guiding principles and explanations that
describe how practices and institutional structures should function. In college admissions,
deficit-oriented theories about the high schools that serve Black, Latinx, and low-income
students are often used to explain the underrepresentation of minoritized students at highly
selective colleges and universities. Admissions offices may theorize, for example, that such
schools’ lack of advanced coursework (Bastedo et al., 2016; Klugman, 2013; Kolluri, 2018)
means that students from the high schools are less likely to be prepared for the rigors of college.
These theories often prevent university admission offices from being able to critically explore the
ways that their admissions routines and assumptions may operationalize bias and reproduce
inequality. Indeed, admissions professionals’ informal theories are not infrequently inaccurate
and may obscure them from recognizing their own complicity or responsibility for contributing
to unequal, even discriminatory, outcomes (Posselt, 2016, 2020).
Frames are micro-individual tools used to meaningfully process experience and guide
action (Benford & Snow, 2000). They are often socially constructed and shape an individual’s
observations and interpretations of the world around them (Warikoo, 2016). Frames, literally
shape how individuals interpret and respond to events (Purdy et al., 2019; Small, 2004). Given
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this study’s interest in understanding how admission officers operationalize issues regarding
race, Bonilla-Silva’s definition of race frames is especially useful. Bonilla-Silva (2018) describes
race frames as predetermined paths for deciphering racialized information. In college
admissions, frames, unlike logics, function at the micro-level and provide the roadmaps
individual admission officers utilize to navigate the challenge of addressing the paradox of
recruiting for yield and recruiting for equity.
Narratives are stories used to represent complex combinations of specific practices and
their outcomes; like frames, they give meaning to individuals and events (Thornton et al., 2012).
Narratives, however, transcend a specific situation and become applied broadly in an
organizational field (Ocasio et al., 2015). While frames may provide roadmaps for admission
officers, narratives hold potential to construct field-level identities and confer legitimacy
(Thornton et al., 2012). In college admissions, narratives can describe how admission practices
diffuse among organizations and across the profession and lead to the maintenance and
reproduction of inequality. For example, college admission offices have developed complex
narratives about the root causes for the underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and low-income
students (e.g., lack of access to rigorous curriculum, inability to pay, etc.) at highly selective
colleges and universities. These narratives about the lack of diversity in highly selective colleges
and universities rarely acknowledge how routine admission practices institutionalize inequality
(McCambly & Colyvas, 2022).
Field-Level Logics in University Admissions
The institutional logics perspective is known for asserting societal level logics; however,
recent interventions have identified meso-level logics that also direct organizational behavior.
Among various types of field-level logics, market logics are commonly known for shifting an
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organizational identity from a profession to a business, and for refocusing the attention to
competition and efficiency (Thornton, 2001). Literature suggests that University admission
officers, as members of an organizational field, have come to be guided by a set of marketing
principles and recruitment tactics which serve as roadmaps for their decision-making and action,
and sense-making about students’ roles and their own professional identities (Iloh & Tierney,
2013; Langston & Loreto, 2017; McDonough & Robertson, 2012). The enrollment management
paradigm contributes directly to these priorities. In undergraduate admissions the pressure to
meet enrollment targets in order to ensure the financial stability of the university is a prime
illustration of how market logic guides behavior (Hossler & Bontrager, 2015). Ingersoll (1988)
argues that the development of enrollment management strategy occurred “primarily because of
external factors at schools, including demographics, changes in consumer attitudes, and
increased attention to each student by many schools. All of this adds up to more competition” (p.
203). The emergence of enrollment strategies and the belief that prospective students were
customers for which admissions offices were competing further demonstrates the prominence of
market logics in college admissions work. Though they have not used the language of market
logics, other scholars have also described how the emergence of market priorities has shifted the
professional identity of admissions staff. McDonough and Robertson (2012) argue that
professionalization of the admission field as a result of the rise of market logics has shifted the
role of the admission officer from being an educator to being a marketer. In a recent interview,
the Vice President for Enrollment Management at Trinity College highlights this tension,
“Everybody wants to have more selectivity and better academic quality and more socioeconomic
diversity, and they want more revenue every single year” (Tough, 2019). This marketization of
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college admission has focused the attention of admission officers on increasing selectivity and
revenue generation, which in many instances is in conflict with the field’s access goals.
Evidence of current market logics in college admission can be traced as far back as the
1950s when Harvard appointed Bender as dean of admissions and financial aid (Synnott, 1979).
One of Bender’s primary tasks as dean of admissions was to “double, if not quadruple, the
number of applicants for the 1,100” (Synnott, 1979, p. 206) seats in Harvard’s first-year class. As
Bender drafted Harvard’s formal college admission policy, a successful first-year class was
described as one that included 75% of students who were “paying customers; [and] at the same
time, a number of Cambridge and Boston-area applicants [which] had to be admitted for political
considerations” (Synnott, 1979, p. 206). Bender also noted that when building a class, it was
important to consider relationships with feeder high schools, geographical diversity, and the
percentage of “alumni sons” (Synnott, 1979, p. 206).
Market logics represent one axis of influence on admissions offices, but it is likely not
the only one. Higher education and sociological research have demonstrated that diversity is an
important dimension of institutional excellence that shapes how admission offices think and talk
about equity (Berrey, 2015; Thomas, 2020). Higher education institutions aspire to build a
diverse freshman class that is academically excellent across multiple dimensions (Hartocollis,
2021; Stevens & Roksa, 2012) These aspirations and the challenges associated with the pursuit
of equity in a capitalist society are deeply rooted in the American psyche, sought after by many
college-going students in today’s generation, and may present a complementary logic of action
and sensemaking in settings like admissions that are tasked with allocating opportunities in a
nominally just way (Stevens & Roksa, 2012; Thomas, 2020). Equity was not defined as one of
the ideal types of institutional orders in the published scholarship on institutional logics, but I
36
would argue that in American society the constant struggle for equality for historically oppressed
and marginalized groups, guides the work of individuals and describes how the social world
functions (Thornton et al., 2012).
As discussed in the literature review, it is no secret that issues of race and class have
played a significant role in shaping the behavior of universities since their founding. Race, in
particular, has played a central role in policy debates regarding access and opportunity since
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) was decided. In fact, the United States Supreme
Court in the opinion for the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) indicated that
having a diverse student body was a compelling state interest (Cohen, 1998). The Brown v. Board
of Education of Topeka (1954), Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), and other
Supreme Court rulings have played a significant role in shaping the work of university admission
offices since they were decided over 40 years ago. The passage of the Higher Education Act, is
another example of a policy that was designed to ensure that the “path of knowledge is open to
all that have the determination to walk” as was stated by President Lyndon B. Johnson (1965).
The signing of the Higher Education Act was intentionally designed to ensure that students from
low-income communities could pursue a college degree if they chose to do so.
If field-level logics focus attention, provide standards, rationales, and vocabularies of
practice, and impose norms about what actions and decisions are appropriate, then in college
admissions equity may well operate as a complementary logic to markets. NACAC’ s Guide to
Ethical Practice in College Admission (2020) states, “Our institutional and individual members
strive to eliminate from the education system bias based on race, ethnicity, creed, sex, gender
identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, political affiliation, national origin, or
disability” (p. 2). The presence of a set of rules, laws, and professional association norms that
37
direct the behavior and describe the work of admission officers in regard to equity should serve
as evidence that equity indeed functions as an institutional logic in admission settings.
College admissions was selected as the area of study in this dissertation proposal because
it is relatively unregulated (Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 1957) and is one of the oldest
administrative units in higher education (Beale, 2012) and would, therefore, serve as an ideal
unit for investigating the potential presence, role, and function of equity logics. Admissions and
enrollment management offices have continually adopted consumer market practices, which have
shifted the admission field’s identity from that of educator to enrollment strategist (Hossler,
1999; Hossler & Bean, 1990; Ingersoll, 1988). At the same time, as arbiters of meritocracy and
opportunity, some admission officers—particularly from minoritized backgrounds—may see
their work as advancing equity and opportunity. Examining the institutional logics that shape
college recruitment practices can provide another lens for understanding the persistent selectivity
gaps present in higher education.
To summarize, I assert that field-level institutional logics play a significant role in
focusing the attention of organizational actors on a specific set of issues and solutions (Thornton,
2001). The market, professions, state, and family logic are institutional orders present in society
which each have a unique set of practices and beliefs; in professional contexts like the
admissions office, they shape how individuals, practitioners, and admission offices themselves
engage in the college recruitment process (Thornton et al., 2012). In college admissions, the
department’s strategy, practices, structure, and identity are therefore expected to be shaped by the
dominant logics influencing the leadership and individuals in the office. Among their decisions,
which high schools to visit may be influenced by both market and equity logics (Leingang, 2019;
Tough, 2019). For instance, an admissions office which is concerned with equity may prioritize
38
visiting high schools in urban areas with a history of low enrollment in selective institutions, or
an office may be heavily influenced by market logics and will select schools that increase the
number of national merit scholars in their applicant pool. In this instance, the specific logics in
play which influence the behaviors of admission officers will ultimately legitimate one set of
admission practices and not others (Thornton, 2001). Table 1 describes the key elements of
equity and market logics that have been documented in college admissions research (Karabel,
2005a; Synnott, 1979; Tough, 2019).
39
Table 1
Ideal Types of University Admissions Logics
Equity logic Market logic
Characteristics Personal responsibility
sense of civic duty
Market capitalism
Organizational identity Admissions as “social justice” Admissions “admits the best”
Legitimacy Office reputation Selectivity
Authority structures Chief enrollment officer,
directors, public
Chief enrollment officer and
directors
Mission Correct past injustices,
provide opportunities for
traditionally
underrepresented students
Maximize tuition revenue
targets, increase selectivity,
yield
Focus of attention Relationship between
admission officer and
underserved high school
communities
Competition with peers
Strategy Build personal relationships
with networks of high
schools that serve under-
resourced communities
Focus on yield networks
Logics of Investment Improve enrollment of Black,
Latinx, and low-income
students
Improve processes and
efficiency of recruitment
practices
Governance Alumni and university
stakeholders, public,
professional associations
Alumni and university
stakeholders
Racialized Organizations
As we consider how individuals and offices manage the contradictions between market
and equity logics in making decisions such as where to visit, Ray’s (2019) racialized
40
organizations perspective is useful. Many scholars who research college admissions practices
often assume that organizational processes are race and class neutral. Throughout this
dissertation, I intend to argue that individual and organizational beliefs about race and class are
central in the development of organizational structures, routines, and practices. The theory of
racialized organizations posits that the reproduction of racial inequality can be explained by
institutionalized “racial schemas, often laundered through facially-neutral bureaucratic
processes” (Ray, 2019, p. 39). Character assessments, high school visits, and campus visit
programs are all tools that admissions offices point to as practices that will ensure a diverse first-
year class. However, many of these practices often engender racial logics they are supposedly
designed to undermine. For instance, limiting Jewish enrollments was the primary motive of the
adoption of character assessments when they diffused among elite colleges in 1922 (Kahlenberg,
2010). Campus tours have also been shown to function as sites where issues of race and racism
are often reproduced (Flint, 2019; Head et al., 2010; Magolda, 2000; Whaley, 2018). Flint (2019)
describes how Whiteness is often embedded in the discourse regarding place. In the analysis of
the tour, Flint is effectively able to describe how the silence of the tour guide regarding the
encounter with a confederate monument and a building named after a eugenicist camouflage
racist practices that universities have often played a role in.
Ray (2019) identifies four characteristics of racialized organizations: (a) racialized
organizations enhance and diminish the agency of racial groups; (b) racialized organizations
facilitate the unequal distribution of resources; (c) racialized organizations establish Whiteness as
a credential that is necessary for access to resources, work hierarchies, and the expansion of
agency; and (d) racialized organizations decouple rules from everyday organizational practices.
These characteristics can be found in much of the work of many university admission offices.
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The desire to increase enrollments of Black students in the 1960s is an example of how
university admission offices intended to restrict the agency of racial groups. Karabel (2005a)
states “the dominant theme in the texts of the period was neither diversity nor compensation for
past injustices, but rather the need for Negro leadership” (p. 408). Legacy preferences were
established in 1920, primarily as a response to ensure that students who traditionally attended
selective institutions would maintain access (Kahlenberg, 2010). The development of legacy
admissions practices is a prime example of how admissions offices facilitate the unequal
distribution of resources. One common, albeit understudied, legacy practice is application
coaching. Highly selective universities through high school visits and campus visit programs
often provide the children of alumni with coaching and insider information to improve their
chances for acceptance (Kahlenberg, 2010). The development of legacy admission was also a
direct attempt by universities to ensure that their constituencies were upper-class white men
(Karabel, 2005a). Legacy preferences and recruitment programs are a prime example of a
credential that was developed by selective admissions offices to establish Whiteness as a
necessary credential for admission.
Lastly, admissions offices frequently develop rules that are decoupled from everyday
practice. In college admissions processes, diversity discourse often addresses issues of race by
downplaying it, diluting it, or by clustering it with a number of other social identities including
but not limited to geography, nation of origin, interests, and special skills, or abilities (Bell &
Hartmann, 2007). In The Shape of the River, Bowen and Bok (1998) note that one of the primary
considerations of admissions staff when assembling a class is the creation of a diverse student
body with different backgrounds, experiences, and talents. This discursive act often leads to
admissions staff engaging in dialogue about equity without ever acknowledging the history of
42
exclusionary practices or the oppressive acts that often lead to different outcomes for minoritized
groups. The frequency and nature of how individual admission offices talk about race plays a
foundational role in shaping admission officer values and organizational practice. The adoption
of exclusionary “organizational scripts” in the college-admission process have reinforced and
legitimated racial and socioeconomic hierarchies that are often decoupled from the diversity
goals espoused by many admission offices (Kahlenberg, 2010; Ray, 2019).
Summary and Research Questions
Although scholars have documented the persistent underrepresentation of Black, Latinx,
and low-income students, there has been less scholarship focused on the organizational practices
that are responsible for maintaining and reproducing the racial and socioeconomic stratification
of higher education. This study explored and described the social foundations of admission
officers’ recruitment behaviors at highly selective colleges or universities. Highly selective
institutions are the focus of this study as they play a significant role in shaping the practices that
guide much of the work of admissions practitioners in the field. This study analyzed the
organizational rules, goals, routines, and narratives that impeded the ability of admission officers
at highly selective institutions to create a first-year class that is reflective of the racial and
socioeconomic demography of America’s high schools. More specifically, this dissertation
examined three main research questions:
1. What outreach and recruitment routines are employed by admission officers in their
pursuit of university enrollment goals?
2. To what extent do university recruitment and outreach activities address long-
standing issues of race and equity?
43
3. How do admission officers understand and respond to the competition of the yield
and equity goals of their office?
44
Chapter Three: Methodology
As the literature review notes, very few empirical studies have explored how college
recruitment strategies have contributed to the persistent selectivity gaps present in higher
education. To understand how equity and market logics shape the organizational identity and
practices of college admissions offices, I investigated how admission officers prioritized and
selected which high schools they would visit during recruitment season. To review, the following
questions guided my analysis:
1. What outreach and recruitment routines are employed by admission officers in their
pursuit of university enrollment goals?
2. To what extent do university recruitment and outreach activities address long-
standing issues of race and equity?
3. How do admission officers understand and respond to the competition of the yield
and equity goals of their office?
Unlike much of the previous empirical research in college admissions, this study
explored the individual and institutional motivations and beliefs that guided the development and
implementation of college admission recruitment policies and practices. There have been
relatively few studies that have attempted to examine how long-standing issues of racism and
classism in higher education have shaped the organizational practices of college admission
offices. The design of this study recognizes the critiques scholars have made about the
limitations of previous research in college admission (Dache-Gerbino et al., 2018; Harper &
Griffin, 2010; Iloh, 2018; McLewis, 2021; Rhoades, 2014). Much of the published research in
college admissions has taken a human capital perspective that is overly focused on individual
student attitudes and behaviors (Hoxby & Avery, 2013; Roderick et al., 2009). Large national
45
surveys and randomized control trials which attempt to explicate the role of information and
procedural assistance in college choice are often focused on the behaviors of students and
communities (Dynarski et al., 2018; Hoxby & Avery, 2013). While these studies have provided
useful information about the ways minoritized students navigate the college choice process, they
often fail to account for the ways that college recruitment strategies constrain the opportunities
available for minoritized student groups. The limitations of available data and scant research on
university decision-making regarding student recruitment highlights the importance of a study
design that is focused on document analysis and participant interviews.
Qualitative data collection techniques are uniquely positioned to provide researchers with
the opportunity to capture the nuances and complexities of social life and capture the otherwise
invisible thought patterns of social actors (Mills et al., 2010; Patton, 2015). Among qualitative
methodologies, the aim of grounded theory is to provide insight into a phenomenon that has been
rarely explored by building inductively from participants’ experiences and perspectives (Kenealy,
2012; Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Grounded theory offers researchers an effective way of studying
social processes, situations, and the actions of individuals in their natural settings (Charmaz,
2003). Since my goal for this study is to explore how micro-processes in college admissions
offices contribute to the consistent underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and low-income
students at highly selective colleges and universities, grounded theory is an ideal selection for a
methodological approach. One advantage of grounded theory as a qualitative method is that it
avoids the problem of describing a single universal truth and is focused on constructing an image
of reality that is shaped by the actions and words of the participant and the researcher (Charmaz,
2003).
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Scholars have argued that grounded theory methods are particularly useful for
“explicating, clarifying, and solving mysteries through inquiry” (Wertz et al., 2011, p. 303).
Creswell (2007) suggests that theory should be derived from interviews, observations, or
documents in the field of study. In this study, I researched the recruitment practices of highly
selective admission offices through a combination of interviews and document analyses.
Sampling Strategy for Discourse Analysis
Theoretical sampling is a well-established approach for collecting data from individuals,
events, and places in order to fill conceptual gaps in the development of theories (Charmaz,
2003; Corbin & Strauss, 2014). The primary purpose of theoretical sampling was to refine
concepts by searching for specific information that illuminates the emerging theory (Charmaz,
2003; Creswell, 2007). To empirically examine the social construction of market and equity
logics in college admissions, electronic copies of admission officer job description from highly
selective colleges and universities were collected from higher education job posting boards (e.g.,
NACAC, HigherEdJobs, Inside Higher Ed) from July 2020 to July 2021. It is a common practice
for college admission offices to post job descriptions on their university human resources
website and an external higher education job board. Job descriptions varied in length and
typically ranged from 250 to 700 words. During the data collection period, I collected and
analyzed 150 unique admission officer position descriptions, which yielded 275 pages of text.
In the data collection stage, I invited 300 admissions office staff members across
institutional types to participate in the study. Eligible admission officers were identified by
utilizing the NACAC membership directory. Email invitations were sent to admission officers
who were working at highly selective colleges and universities. Eligibility criteria for selection
required participants to be employed at a highly selective institution for a minimum of one full
47
admissions cycle. I used maximal variation sampling when constructing the directory of
individuals who were invited to participate in the study. Maximal variation sampling is a
technique that encourages researchers to choose individuals that differ on some characteristic or
trait (Creswell, 2007). At the beginning of the study, I made an intentional effort to ensure that
there was representation from admission officers from public and private institutions across the
country. I recruited participants that reflected various institutional types, geographic regions,
years of experience, and social identities. I recruited admission officers from a wide range of
institutional types so that I could document the variations in university recruitment practices that
emerged as a result of admission officers’ adaptations to their institutional setting (Patton, 2002).
Data Collection
Interviews
Researchers have posited that in-depth interviews provide a unique ability to understand
the issues that shape people’s perspectives regarding issues of race and equity (Bonilla-Silva,
2018; Warikoo, 2016). Lamont and Swidler (2014) state that qualitative interviews provide
researchers with the opportunity to collect data not only about behavior, but also about the
mental representations, cultural beliefs, classification systems, emotions, and imagined realities
that provide explanations for the actions of individuals in the social world. This affordance is
especially important for the current study, as it is primarily focused on understanding how
individual admission officers respond to and manage the competing values, priorities, and
institutional practices that are often found in their work.
To explore how admission officers made decisions about which high schools they choose
to visit during recruitment season, I conducted a total of 21 semi-structured interviews ranging
from 45 to 60 minutes. The plurality of the interviews I conducted with admission officers lasted
48
for the full hour. One advantage of semi-structured interviews is that they allow researchers to
probe facts, responses, and situations in greater detail than survey data allow (Lamont & Swidler,
2014). The interviews covered a range of topics associated with the research questions including
individual motivation for entering the profession, professional experiences in admissions,
academic preparation, staff training, participation in professional associations, role and
importance of high school visits, the operationalization of racial equity goals, and lastly how
recruitment travel decisions were made in the admissions offices where they are employed. The
interview topics I explored in interviews were selected because they were well aligned with the
research questions and the theories presented in Chapter 2. They also provided the grounds for
themes that served as sensitizing concepts in the analysis phase of the project (Charmaz, 2003).
Drawing on a process developed by Rivera (2015) in her seminal study on hiring, one set
of questions asked participants to verbally evaluate a set of fictitious high school profiles and
their admissions dashboards. I reviewed a number of the leading enrollment management data
systems and intentionally developed the profiles and dashboards to reflect the diversity of
possible high schools that could request a high school visit. The profile and admission
dashboards were used as a tool to facilitate discussion and gain insight about the criteria
admission officers used to determine whether high schools were worthy of a recruitment visit. In
qualitative research, elicitation techniques such as the one described above are used to encourage
participants to share their insights about tacit and procedural knowledge that they are often
reluctant to or have limited experience discussing with others (Barton, 2015; Cooke, 1994;
Johnson & Weller, 2002).
All participant interviews were conducted via Zoom and were recorded. Audio files were
transcribed by Otter. Once the transcripts were returned, I reviewed them for accuracy before
49
uploading them to Dedoose for coding. In total, the sample contained 21 admission officers from
multiple university contexts—six public universities, two Ivy League colleges, and 11 from
private universities. Of the 21 participants, 14 were people of color, 17 were women, and four
were men.
Document Analysis
Document analysis is a systematic set of procedures for reviewing documents that might
provide insights that researchers may utilize to gain an understanding of a phenomenon of
interest (Creswell, 2007). Document analysis, when used in combination with other qualitative
research methods, provides an opportunity for researchers to substantiate findings across
different data sets and reduce the potential for bias in a research study (Bowen, 2009). Mohr and
Lee (2000) suggest that “Organizations are especially appropriate subjects for textual analysis
because so much of what they do involves the production of texts” (p. 52). Acker (1990) posits
that organizational documents “contain symbolic indicators of structure” (p. 147) and that the
manner in which they are discussed and interpreted by individuals can provide valuable insight
about the institutional logics from which they are derived.
For the purposes of this study, the inquiry into prevailing logics included a review of
various organizational documents from highly selective colleges and universities. University
websites, student newspapers, recruitment plans, and job descriptions are four types of
documents that were reviewed to elicit information about institutional logics. I collected these
documents for each institution that posted an admission officer vacancy from July 2020 to July
2021. In total, the sample contained documents from over 90 highly selective institutions.
In my analysis, I explored the relationship of the document to the social context in which
it was produced, and also the impact of its specific discursive framing on the actions of
50
admission professionals who I was interviewing. Job descriptions, website, and recruitment plans
were used to gather information about admission processes in the field more broadly, which
helped frame my understanding of information that was shared in participant interviews. These
documents can be best understood as organizational speech acts that reflected institutionalized
organizational scripts and vocabularies of practice in college admissions.
Dowd and Bensimon (2014) posit that artifacts can provide valuable insight about an
individual’s thinking, actions, and planning for equity. Admission websites and job descriptions
are artifacts that can provide important information about the role of equity in the individual and
collective thinking, planning, and actions of a university admissions office. The analysis of
university websites and admission officer job descriptions provided an opportunity to explicitly
assess how the discursive framing of the priorities, beliefs, and primary functions of the college
admissions office was aligned with their university’s stated equity goals. In this study, the review
of university websites and admission officer job descriptions provided me with the opportunity
to triangulate data about how market and equity logics were operationalized on a given
university campus and, more importantly, how conceptualizations of equity were situated in the
larger admissions field. For the purposes of this study, document analysis was a complementary
data collection procedure for theory building and triangulation (Bowen, 2009).
During the data collection phase, I collected 150 admission officer job descriptions from
100 highly selective colleges and universities that posted admission officer vacancies during the
period. I also reviewed the admission websites of institutions that posted vacancies on admission
job posting boards. The job description and college admission website review were designed to
complement interview data. These documents were helpful for developing a broad understanding
of the role of market and equity logics in the college admissions profession.
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Data Analysis
In grounded theory studies data are often analyzed using the constant comparative
method which involves the following stages: (a) data is analyzed and broken into codes; (b)
codes are then analyzed into categories; (c) categories are used to delimit the theory; and (d)
researcher reflects on themes and writes the theory (Glaser, 1965, p. 439). Other scholars refer to
these stages as open, axial, and selective coding.
During the initial phase of open coding, I used line-by-line coding to analyze fragments
of data in a manner that is consistent with the grounded theory method (Wertz et al., 2011). I
utilized this approach when coding interviews, websites, and job descriptions. When coding
interviews and documents I labeled problems, processes, beliefs, and resources that were
described by participants in their interviews. While engaged in the open coding process, I
continued to conduct interviews and begin to select additional participants who could provide
further insight about issues that I wanted to explore in further detail. Once this stage was
complete, I proceeded to axial coding. Axial coding techniques are focused on drawing
connections between a category and its subcategories (Charmaz, 2003). During the axial coding
process, I described the conditions that facilitated the rise of a category, the social context, and
the interactions amongst actors in the situation (Charmaz, 2003). Once I analyzed the initial
pieces of data in the axial coding phase, I went back into the field to gather additional
information that would help me refine and further develop my ideas. I continued to conduct
interviews, review websites, and collect job descriptions in the field until theoretical saturation
occurred (Dey, 1999). Once saturation occurred, I moved to selective coding which was the final
level of coding. During the selective coding stage, I identified and connected larger themes
present in the various forms of data I collected (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Strauss & Corbin,
52
1997). In the section that follows, I describe the process that I utilized to code websites and job
descriptions in greater detail.
Data Analysis Documents
Inspired by Gross’ work on social mechanisms, when I reviewed admission officer
positions descriptions, admission office websites, and high school college-counseling websites, I
initially asked three questions:
1. What problem was the discourse in this text trying to resolve?
2. Who are the actors engaged in this process?
3. What resources and habits of mind were available to actors as they attempted to
accomplish their goals?
When analyzing websites and job descriptions I organized text into categories related to
the research questions in this study. For example, recruitment and diversity were sample codes
that I used for analysis. I coded any text that described territory management, data tools, or high
school recruitment. I followed a similar process for diversity and coded any text that mentioned
commitments to diversity or multicultural recruitment as diversity. All together there were 15
codes that were clustered in various categories (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Clustering allowed
me to group and conceptualize codes that had similar patterns or were related in some way.
Processes, actors, and challenges were three cluster that allowed me to move to higher levels of
abstraction.
As I reviewed documents, I investigated how admissions offices defined equity, how they
described equity-minded practice, the composition of their admissions staff, how they spoke
about off-campus visits, how they assigned territories, and lastly the mission of the admissions
office. When all of the websites and job descriptions were reviewed, I looked for patterns in the
53
data to generate emerging themes that were used for analysis. Once the initial themes were
developed, I attempted to integrate the data with information collected during participant
interviews (Bowen, 2009).
Limitations
There are a few limitations of the study that are worthy to note. Consistent with the
critiques of qualitative research, this dissertation study could only describe the behaviors,
attitudes, and practices of admission officers at a specific moment in time (Charmaz, 2003).
Increased scrutiny in the press and on-going litigation happening in the courts regarding
affirmative action created an environment where admission offices were extremely reluctant to
speak publicly about their admission and recruitment activities. While I wanted to observe high
school visits and on-campus information sessions as part of this study, COVID-19 disruptions
made this infeasible. Additionally, admissions processes are often regarded as intellectual
property, so many admission offices were opposed to sharing actual recruitment schedules with
me. While COVID-19 and the on-going affirmative action battles in the courts made engaging
with admission officers challenging, I was able to find 21 admission officers who were willing
and able to share their insights about working in highly selective college environments with me.
As part of the study’s design, I decided to limit the study to admission practices at highly
selective institutions because their practices are often utilized by practitioners in the field at
large. I pursued this approach because, as Khan (2012) posits, the study of elites is necessary to
understand modern engines of inequality. Through an analysis of the value, distribution, and
control of off-campus recruitment resources, I was able to explore how admission offices and the
staff within them managed the tensions and contradictions of everyday admissions work.
Although the study illuminates how admission offices and the staff within them make decisions
54
about off-campus recruitment visits, it does not assess the impact of off-campus recruitment
visits have on prospective students. Finally, given the sample size of the study, the findings are
not assumed to be generalizable or representative of the recruitment practices of all college
admission officers.
Positionality
In qualitative research, “a researcher’s self-awareness, knowledge of the subject under
investigation, and skills to discern and be sensitive to salient but subtle aspects of the data are
vital for qualitative inquiry, especially grounded theory” (Green et al., 2007, p. 481). The idea for
this dissertation was initially conceived as I was supporting a group of high school students and
school counselors in their navigation of the college application season. As a former director of
college counseling for an urban charter school network, I witnessed how college recruitment
activities would shape the choices high school students made about where they would apply. As a
Black, first-generation, low-income student, my own decision to attend college was shaped by
university admission officers that made me and my family “feel wanted.” Collectively, these
professional and personal experiences have provided me with much insight about the work of
college access and admission professionals which may afford me the benefit of being an insider.
Insider status typically affords researchers greater access and acceptance from participants in the
study (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009). One’s role as an insider often leads to an environment where
participants are more open to sharing in greater detail.
As one can imagine, my experience as an insider presented unique challenges. My close
proximity to the issue being studied can lead to questions about objectivity, reflexivity, and
authenticity (Dwyer & Buckle, 2009). In an effort to reduce these concerns during the data
collection and analytical process, I routinely drafted memos and processed interviews with
55
trusted colleagues outside of the study in order to explore any preconceptions and biases that
might cloud my judgment (Tufford & Newman, 2010). In an effort to address questions
regarding the validity of my analysis, I discussed my preliminary findings with admission
professionals via individual meetings on Zoom.
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Chapter Four: Constructing Inequality and the Admission Officer Role
The competition for students with elite admission credentials can be traced back to the
late 1920s (Wechsler, 2014). That period signaled a transition of what Frank Adelotte, President
of Swarthmore College, described as a shift away from a “race for numbers” to a “race for
quality” (Wechsler, 2014, p. 230). Since these words were uttered by President Adelotte in 1928,
highly selective colleges and universities have been engaged in a prestige arms race that has
normalized recruitment practices focused on maintaining their elite status.
The high school visit is one admissions practice that is influenced by the race for quality.
Each year, admission officers travel around the globe to high schools, college fairs, and
community receptions, searching for National Merit scholars and students with high SAT scores
or grade point averages that will submit applications and, perhaps, enroll in their college or
university. During the fall recruitment season, college admission offices use school visits to
develop relationships with high schools that share similar elite status (Golden, 2007; Khan, 2012;
Meyer, 1977). As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, through the formation of these recruitment
networks, admission offices also establish categorical boundaries that often exclude students who
attend high schools that serve large concentrations of Black, Latinx, and low-income students
(Gordon, 2013; Salazar et al., 2021). Due to the racialization of these recruitment networks,
students from Black, Latinx, or low-income communities often have different access to,
experiences of, and interactions with college admission offices.
In this chapter, I argue that one reason that admission officers fail to recruit students from
predominantly Black and Latinx high schools is due to the racial and socioeconomic
exclusionary practices that have been institutionalized in college admissions offices via the
definition of admission officers’ role. The discourse analysis of 150 job descriptions in this
57
chapter will examine how college admission offices construct the role of the admission officer
and more importantly, how this construction shapes how admission officers execute their
responsibilities.
Job descriptions are oriented toward action and are purposefully constructed by
institutional agents to achieve an organization’s goals and objectives. In college admission
settings, these documents are produced by admission directors to shape expectations, organize
experiences, and orient new staff about acceptable standards of conduct. As cultural artifacts,
these job descriptions can provide valuable insight into the institutional logics that are present in
and have been institutionalized in a particular college admissions office. They illuminate how
admission offices are structured, how they organize activity, and the roles and responsibilities
they delegate to their members.
Admissions officer behavior is a social practice, how individuals conduct themselves in
their organizations and how they fulfill their responsibilities is socially constructed by
organizations through the adoption of formal policy and practice (Feldman & Rafaeli, 2002;
Meyer & Rowan, 1977). How individual college admission offices come to prioritize which high
schools are worthy of a high school visit during recruitment season is influenced by the theories,
frames, and narratives an admission office regarding (a) the role of recruitment in meeting
financial enrollment targets; (b) beliefs about who is admissible; and (c) the role and importance
of diversity in building a successful first-year class. These theories, frames, and narratives
proliferate a set of organizational practices that can be found in job descriptions. For example,
theories, frames, and narratives about who is admissible, or who is likely to enroll influence who
admissions offices target with their outreach (MacMillan & Anderson, 2019). Job descriptions
are a discursive tool available to colleges and universities to shape admission officer beliefs
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about acceptable conduct and ensure their compliance with the organization’s goals and
objectives.
As a Foucauldian analysis activity (Potter & Edwards, 1990), this discourse analysis was
focused on exploring the ways college admissions offices utilize discourse to frame how
individual admission officers come to understand their role and subsequently shape the set of
activities they pursue as they fulfill their professional responsibilities. For example, I pay special
attention to the inclusion or exclusion of specific content or topics (e.g., identity claims, race,
qualifications, etc.) because these decisions are made by institutional agents to send signals to
prospective candidates about the well-established traditions, values, and beliefs of their
respective offices. The discursive choices made by colleges and universities in the construction
of job descriptions are representations of organizational strategy that have been and will be
enacted by admission officers in their interactions with others. In what follows, I examine six key
discourses about college admissions that emerged from the data. The first discourse I review
describes how admission offices define themselves and establish their organizational identity.
The second discourse explores how job descriptions framed the role and importance of off-
campus recruitment practices in the daily operation of the college admissions office. The third
discourse examines how admission offices describe key admission routines. The fourth discourse
explores how organizational status structures the interactions that highly selective colleges have
with high schools. The fifth discourse describes how admission offices utilize data to influence
the decision-making of admissions staff. Lastly, I conclude the chapter by examining how
college admission offices utilize discourse to attend to issues of diversity and equity.
The frequency with which each discourse appeared in the data set is presented in Table 2
in order to clarify the meaning of key discourses and illustrate patterns present in the data
59
(Maxwell, 2013; Miles & Huberman, 1994). The discourse that was often presented at the
beginning of the job descriptions is where I will begin my exploration of admission officer job
descriptions.
Table 2
Frequency of Key Discourses in the Data
Key discourse
Number of job descriptions containing
key discourse (n = 150)
1. How admission offices define themselves and
establish their organizational identity
91
2. Role and importance of off-campus recruitment
practices in the operation of the college
admissions office
142
3. Description of key admission routines 139
4. Connecting how organizational status structures
interactions admission offices have with
constituencies
65
5. Use of data in admission decision-making 90
6. Exploring how admission offices express and
operationalize commitments to diversity
85
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Imaging the College Admissions Office
The topics, themes, and subjects in job descriptions construct organizational reality
(Strati, 1998). One aspect of organizational reality that is important to discuss is organizational
identity, which shapes how things get done and enables individuals to make sense of their
environment (Bévort & Sudday, 2016; Miner, 1991; Santos & Eisenhardt, 2005). Many of the
job descriptions in this sample, for example, began with a series of identity claims about an
admission office’s selectivity. Identity claims by nature establish organizational values and often
clarify an organization’s status in relation to others (Ran & Duimering, 2007). In the section
below, I explore how admission offices define themselves to prospective employees through how
they evoke their selective identities. Across the sample, selective identities were evoked to (a)
explain the pace and application volume of the office; and (b) set expectations for prospective
employees about what it means to be a staff member in a selective college admissions
environment.
Nearly all of the job descriptions that made reference to a college’s selective college
identity quantified the number of applications the admission office received in the previous year.
The quantification of application volume sets the stage for how college admission officers may
anticipate workload and come to think about recruitment as an application generating practice.
One Mid-Atlantic private university included the following in their opening narrative:
“Admissions Officer (AO) works in a fast-paced, deadline-driven, high-demand office, which
receives in excess of 106,000 applications annually and is engaged in a highly selective
admissions process each year” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, December 20, 2021).
1
A
1
As per APA style guidelines confidentiality and anonymity may be extended to internal documents in
order to protect confidentiality and/or anonymity of educational organizations. In the highly litigious college
admissions space, it is important to protect the anonymity of college admission professionals and institutions who
are referenced in this study and has been the norm for studies of this nature. Throughout this chapter pseudonyms
61
private liberal arts college in New England echoed a similar sentiment and included the
following: “[our] applicant pool and enrolling class sizes have been increasing for the past five
years, while retaining a highly selective academic profile and a commitment to increasing
financial aid” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, December 20, 2021). The quantification
of application volume in job descriptions sets expectations for which admission officers are
evaluated and how they judge the success of their recruitment efforts. Application is an issue that
will be explored in further detail in Chapter 5.
Selectivity also defines who an admission office is for various audiences and is a
reflection of an admission office’s status and power in the higher education marketplace (Meyer,
1977; Ran & Duimering, 2007). Nearly a quarter of the admission offices in the sample included
language about their ability to select among the best or brightest students across the globe. One
institution included the following in the opening narrative of an admission officer job
description: “Ivy Plus University, is a highly selective Ivy League university, able to choose from
among the very best applicants in the nation and the world” (HigherEdJobs, personal
communication, July 10, 2021). Another college expanded on this description: “recruited and
chosen through a highly selective admission process, undergraduates come to New England
Liberal Arts College from around the world and a wide variety of backgrounds” (HigherEdJobs,
personal communication, July 10, 2021). While these statements may seem innocuous, they are
sending signals to prospective candidates about the ways they can expect to engage prospective
students. The ability to choose from among the very best applicants also communicates the
power that the institution has over prospective students in the college application process.
are utilized to protect colleges or universities whose data is included in this chapter. Discourse analysis procedures
by their very nature are concerned with the specific construction of text and for that reason direct unredacted
segments of text are used.
62
If identity is a tool that individuals utilize to make sense of their environment, what does
it mean for a college to stress their organizational identity in staff recruitment materials?
Oyserman (2009) has argued that researchers need to pay attention to identity construction in
organizations because individuals are often motivated to engage in identity congruent ways.
Identities not only define who organizations are, they also describe how the organization engages
others (Ran & Duimering, 2007). Let us now turn to the second discourse which reviews the role
and purpose of off-campus recruitment.
Setting the Stage: Role and Purpose of Off-Campus Recruitment Activities
Feldman and Rafaeli (2002) argue that organizations attempt to link individual action to
broader organizational goals and objectives in order to coordinate activity amongst staff. Many
of the job descriptions in this sample attempted to link off-campus recruitment activities to the
goals and objectives of their respective admissions office. For example, a large urban private
institution from the Midwest indicated that admission officers were responsible for planning and
implementing “strategic recruitment practices, both long-term and short-term, to achieve
University undergraduate enrollment objectives” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication,
March 20, 2021). One public university from the Midwest noted that admission staff in:
“collaboration with enrollment management and admission leadership, develop focused,
integrated, and data-driven recruitment plans which align with the University’s ambitious goals”
(HigherEdJobs, personal communication, March 20, 2021). A mid-size urban private college
from the Northeast provides more specificity and notes that an admission officer: “designs,
implements and directs effective recruitment strategies that fulfill the enrollment objectives set
by the Dean” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, March 2, 2021). The similarity in how
institutions in the sample linked recruitment routines to broader organizational goals and
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objectives may be interpreted as an effort by admission offices to create shared understandings
among admission staff.
The inclusion of specific text that describes the role that recruitment practices play in
meeting organizational goals and objectives may also be interpreted as an attempt to provide
justifications for their practices to prospective staff (Weick, 2012). At the micro-level, these
justifications provide shared understandings amongst admission staff about what recruitment
practices are appropriate and why recruitment is an important endeavor in the first place
(Feldman & Rafaeli, 2002). Developing shared understandings amongst staff about the role and
purpose of the admission officer role via the job description is critically important for directors of
admission because, in the day-to-day work of college admissions, admission officers have a great
deal of independence in the execution of their duties.
Admission offices, like many organizations in society writ large, recognize that they do
not have complete control of the activities of their staff (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). In the sample,
of job descriptions, it appears that admission offices attempted to manage this tension by
articulating the importance of remaining abreast of various admissions policies and procedures in
their job descriptions. One highly selective public university noted that admission staff “Must
maintain current knowledge of applicable rules and standards of all associations and agencies to
which the University adheres, and, at all times avoid any and all violations of these rules and
standards.” A large private urban university in the South included the following,
Under the direction of a member of the Undergraduate Admission Senior Team
(Associate or Senior Associate Director), the Admission Counselor recruits, and works to
enroll, qualified students for admission to the school in accordance with all applicable
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internal and external policies and regulations. (HigherEdJobs, personal communication,
July 14, 2021)
While the admission field is governed by state and federal policies regarding affirmative action,
who universities admit is a fundamental right codified by jurisprudence in Sweezy v. New
Hampshire, 1957. In essence, the inclusion of the word “external” in these statements may be
read as an attempt to provide legitimacy to organizational practices that have been crystallized
over time as formal rules and standards for conduct (Gray et al., 1985).
The position descriptions included in this sample described the purpose and function of
off-campus recruitment activities as (a) opportunities to share information about institutional
admission and financial aid procedures; and (b) tools to build relationships with high schools and
community-based organizations in a geographic territory. Importantly, information sharing and
relationship building do not appear from job descriptions to be mechanisms for the public good,
but rather mechanisms to support university enrollment goals by encouraging prospective
students to apply and enroll in the university. In the sections that follow, I will delve deeper into
the role and purpose of high school visits by exploring how admission offices talk about and
operationalize information sharing and relationship building in admission officer job
descriptions.
High School Visits as a Tool for Information Sharing
Many of the position descriptions in the sample defined the purpose of off-campus
recruitment activities as opportunities to share information about the university’s programs and
services. One Ivy League university admission officer job description noted that admission
officers were responsible for sharing information about the university’s “undergraduate academic
and extracurricular programs, its generous resources, and admission and financial aid policies”
65
(HigherEdJobs, personal communication, July 10, 2021) with prospective applicants. A private
university in the South described recruitment responsibilities with the following: “Determines
how best to disseminate information about Private Southern University to specific markets and
tailors’ admissions activities accordingly. Educates and updates high school counselors and
prospective students concerning the University’s mission, characteristics, and accomplishments”
(HigherEdJobs, personal communication, March 20, 2021). Another university stated that
admission officers “Provide information and advice about Ivy League College, generally, and
about its admissions procedures specifically, through information sessions conducted on-campus
and elsewhere” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, July 10, 2021). The inclusion of
similar text in nearly all of the position descriptions in the sample illustrates that off-campus
recruitment as “information sharing” is highly institutionalized and widely diffused amongst
admission offices.
Over time “information sharing” has effectively become what good admission offices do
to attract prospective candidates (Glynn & Watkiss, 2012). In the position descriptions, off-
campus recruitment presentations were framed as a communication tool, one that would educate
external audiences about a variety of subjects, including student life, research, internships,
athletics, admission standards, and financial aid policies. External audiences were commonly
defined as prospective applicants, their parents, community-based organizations, and high school
counselors.
The information shared through off-campus recruitment is a critical resource for
prospective students, which is one reason why admission officers’ decisions about which high
schools to visit are so consequential. In the college enrollment process, high schools are critical
resource brokers that provide access to information and interactions with admission officers from
66
selective institutions (Holland, 2019; Small, 2006). The information that flows through
recruitment networks includes colleges coming to high schools, and high school college
counselors going to where admission officers gather. For instance, a school counseling page on
the website for a private independent day school on the West coast noted that their high school
“Counselors travel to several national conferences to maintain relationships with hundreds of
college admissions offices.” This school described their relationship with colleges on their
website to legitimate their professional expertise to parents. The school further elaborated,
“graduates of our Upper School consistently enroll in highly selective colleges and universities
across the country and around the world.” From the high school perspective, the high school visit
and off-campus recruitment activities are beneficial for both students and school counselors
because they provide an opportunity for students and counselors to interact with an admissions
representative who may be reviewing their applications during the admissions phase. For school
counselors, these relationships provide insider knowledge that enhances their ability to help
students navigate the college application process. For students, these interactions often provide
valuable information about the application process that is usually not publicly accessible on
college admission websites.
High School Visits as a Tool for Relationship Building
In nearly all of the admission officer position descriptions universities described the role
and importance of high school visits in the development and maintenance of relationships with
target high schools. One urban private university in the Northeast indicated that admission
officers were responsible for “managing a recruitment territory. This role requires extensive
travel domestically in order to build and maintain relationships with high school personnel as
well as prospective students and their families” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, July 6,
67
2021). A public university on the West coast indicated that admission officers should possess an
“Ability to establish and maintain cooperative relationships with schools” (HigherEdJobs,
personal communication, 2021). The formation of social ties between high schools and colleges
is a “recognition process” (Lamont, 2018) in which the characteristics of high schools are
acknowledged and affirmed by a recruiting college admission office. There were variations,
however, in whom institutions recognized as partners in the off-campus recruitment process.
One of the more significant variations was the inclusion of community-based
organizations (e.g., Posse, Questbridge) as a constituency for recruiting students from
marginalized groups. For instance, one large Midwestern private university noted that admission
officer “recruitment responsibilities include, but are not limited to, building relationships and
hosting presentations in market visiting high schools and community organizations”
(HigherEdJobs, personal communication, July 1 2020). A Northeastern faith-based private
college had similar language and included a responsibility to “manage relationships with
Community Based Organizations (CBOs), including site visits, hosting group tours”
(HigherEdJobs, personal communication, April 1, 2021) in their multicultural recruiter position
description. A private liberal arts college in the Midwest noted that their lead multicultural
recruitment officer “will strengthen, cultivate, and develop new relationships with CBOs,
scholarship programs, and college access programs” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication,
November 28, 2021). The practice of privileging community-based organizations deprives
students who attend high schools that serve predominantly Black, Latinx, and low-income
students of access to information networks that can improve the likelihood that they will apply
and enroll in a highly selective college or university. This is especially important since
approximately two-thirds of Black and Latinx high school students are enrolled in schools where
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more than 50% of the students are eligible for free and reduced lunch (National Equity Atlas,
2021). Previous research has established that the racial and socioeconomic stratification of high
schools in the United States consistently disadvantages members of groups who have been
marginalized in higher education (Davies & Zarifa, 2012; Ford et al., 2021; Klugman, 2013). If
we are interested in understanding and addressing the racial and socioeconomic stratification of
higher education, we must pay attention to the specific mechanisms that exclude Black, Latinx,
and low-income students from institutionalized college-going networks. Redirecting attention
from high schools to community-based organizations in the recruitment of minoritized students
is one such mechanism. Having explored the role and purpose of off-campus recruitment, the
next section explores how organizational status structures the interactions that highly selective
colleges have with high schools.
Status Matters
In the analysis of the data, it became abundantly clear that organizational status in the
broader admissions field shaped how universities constructed the role and responsibilities of
admission officers. One way that the role of organizational status manifested itself was in the
allocation of staff time to off-campus recruitment activities which varied by institutional type.
Public colleges and private universities in the most competitive Barron’s category allocated less
time to off-campus recruitment activities. For many of the universities in the sample, over 20%
of admission officers’ time was allocated to off-campus recruitment activities. For example, one
private mid-size faith-based university in the Southwest noted that the admission officer role
“involves high travel seasons including approximately 75% travel from August to December and
25% or more travel from February 1–May 1” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, June 21,
2021). Similarly, a small private faith-based college in the Midwest indicated that prospective
69
candidates should expect to be available to “travel up to 50% of the work schedule”
(HigherEdJobs, personal communication, 2021). In contrast, an Ivy League institution in the
Northeast stated that admission officers were responsible for increasing the college’s “visibility
in the designated region” by completing “2–4 weeks of travel each year” (HigherEdJobs,
personal communication, July 6, 2021).
From a Foucaldian perspective, the allocation of staff time to recruitment might implicitly
signal the relational power of specific institutions in America’s highly stratified system of higher
education. Those institutions that are prestigious, resource-rich, and have significant application
volume, such as the Ivy League institution noted above, are able to reduce their allocations of
staff time to recruitment activities because they are aware of their status in the college
admissions marketplace. They understand that they will receive many more applications than
they need, regardless of their recruitment efforts. As part of the academic capitalist enterprise, the
allocation of staff time to recruitment activities is part of the power that admission offices hold
and how they utilize this power to form networks can tell us much about how inequality is
reproduced and maintained.
Another manner in which status was reflected in the data can be seen in the descriptions
of preferred qualifications for hiring. In the job descriptions analyzed in this sample, institutions
signaled their interest in candidates that came from institutions that were of similar elite status.
For example, an Ivy League institution, when describing preferred qualifications included,
“Experience in a highly selective admissions office is strongly preferred” (HigherEdJobs,
personal communication, April 1, 2020). Another Ivy League institution noted their preference
for prospective admission officers to possess “at least 2 years of professional experience as a
college/university or independent school admission officer in a highly selective admissions
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environment” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, Mar 2, 2021). There were, however,
slight variations in how institutions signaled their interest for staff from similar status groups.
These variations were often reflective of the university’s own organizational status in relation to
its peers. One highly-competitive public university indicated a preference for “1 to 2 Years
Admissions experience at a competitive institution (either as an admissions professional or
student ambassador)” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, July 5, 2021). The use of
“competitive institution” as the descriptor rather than “highly selective” may depict a status
boundary that the organization wanted to signal to prospective employees. Specifically, this
college wanted to set expectations about the types of professionals they were looking for. As a
“competitive” institution, they were interested in staff members who would know what it meant
to be a staff member at a “competitive” college or university.
In college admissions, given the high turnover of staff, selecting admission officers from
peer institutions is an evaluative shortcut that organizations utilize to reduce the socialization
necessary and increase the likelihood that new staff will commit to and enforce the status quo
(Amis et al., 2020; Hoover, 2016; Meyer, 1977). This pattern is consistent with Collins’ (1971)
argument that organizations select members of their own status group or those who have been
similarly socialized in order to maintain the hegemony of their status culture. In this case, by
selecting admission officers who come from similar status groups, admission offices can ensure
their staff possess congruent belief systems about selective admissions, including how offices
should function. Previous experience with admission processes at highly selective colleges and
universities is a credential that admission offices include in their job descriptions because it
raises the likelihood of a common knowledge base that will shape the ways in which new
admission officers perform their responsibilities.
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A third way in which the role of organizational status was evident were the ways in which
colleges assigned geographic territories. These geographic territories provided insight into how
elite high schools and colleges interacted with each other. In an analysis of the websites of
college admission offices represented in the sample, I noticed a territory assignment pattern that
reflected both the high school’s status and an admissions officer’s positional status in their
organization’s hierarchy. Some highly selective colleges would assign senior leaders as the
admissions office representative for private preparatory schools. For example, in one private
university, the assistant dean and director of admission were both assigned geographic territories
that were solely composed of elite private preparatory feeder high schools in the surrounding
community. One public university in the Northeast had a similar assignment for the special
assistant to the vice president for enrollment management. It is important to note here that in
many college admission offices, senior leaders are often not assigned geographic territories at all.
This assignment was likely a strategic decision by the college and one that illustrates the
importance universities place on cultivating relationships with elite high school constituencies.
So far, this chapter has been focused on the role and purpose of off-campus recruitment activities
and the role that organizational status plays in influencing the relationships that colleges develop
with high schools. The following section will discuss how admissions offices utilize data driven
decision-making as a tool to influence the decision-making of admissions staff.
Data-Driven Decision-Making
Across institutions in the sample, admission officer position descriptions included
expectations regarding high school visit selection strategies. One selection strategy that was
consistent across job descriptions involved the use of data in decision-making. Admission officer
position descriptions in the sample frequently called for enrollment management professions to
72
utilize data and enrollment algorithms to design targeted recruitment plans that would ensure that
the appropriate number of students would apply and enroll in their respective universities
(Engler, 2021).
For one private university in the Southeast, admission staff were expected to “collect
data, plans and execute admissions travel to specified geographical regions in alignment with
university enrollment goals” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, July 5, 2021). Another
private university noted that admission staff should “Assess the effectiveness of annual travel by
using data analytics platforms and information; recommend changes and suggest new approaches
in annual report format” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, 2021). A highly selective
college on the West coast indicated that admission officers should “conduct analysis on the
effectiveness of territorial outreach programs and make recommendations on strategies; e.g.,
oversee collection of enrollment data, develop reports and analyses to make recommendations
for future program development” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, June 21, 2020).
The heavy reliance on data to make decisions about which high schools receive a visit
structurally diminishes the agency of admission staff and reduces the likelihood that new high
school relationships will be formed. I explore the use of data in greater detail in Chapter 5. In
previous research on cultural gatekeeping scholars have found that evaluations are often shaped
by established reputations, peer opinions from prior reviews, and the actions of competitors
(Bowman & Bastedo, 2011; Janssen & Verboord, 2015). In a racially stratified higher education
system, data and algorithms that do not account for how the metrics utilized have been impacted
by bias often standardize social exclusion.
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Framing Equity and Diversity
In addition to the indirect ways that admissions work contributes to racial and
socioeconomic stratification, which have been the focus of the findings in this chapter thus far,
how admission offices directly communicate about diversity, equity, and inclusion in job
descriptions is critically important. Job descriptions, as organizational artifacts, provide a
perspective about an admission office’s point of view on issues of diversity and racial justice
(Björninen et al., 2020). They send signals about organizational values that may influence how
admission officers carry out their day-to-day work in the college admissions office. The
discourse regarding issues of equity in higher education has been shaped by jurisprudence,
governmental policy, and public sentiment about issues of equity in college admissions. For
instance, the decision in the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) case shifted
the discourse in the college admissions space away from restorative justice for racially oppressed
groups to diversity as a marker of educational excellence (Hakkola, 2019; Marichal, 2009). This
has led to broadening definitions of diversity that include socioeconomic status, first-generation
college status, global and geographic diversity, and more recently, diversity of intellectual
interest (Berrey, 2015; Thomas, 2020). This broadening of diversity can also be seen in the ways
diversity, equity, and inclusion are discussed in the job descriptions in this sample.
Scholars have noted that although ideas about diversity and equity are shaped by broader
national discourses, they are spatially constituted (Barajas & Ronnkvist, 2007; Lipsitz, 2007;
Warikoo, 2016). How individual admissions offices enact and express their beliefs and
definitions about diversity are reflections of their own histories and institutional dynamics
(Douds, 2021; Smith, 2019). Like all habits of mind, collective representations about equity are
social endeavors, which means they can be observed and assessed empirically. Accordingly, I
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attempt to study these representations by paying specific attention to how issues of race and class
are taken up in the position descriptions.
In my analysis, I find that college admission offices, possibly in their desire to maintain
their legitimacy amongst the public and in order to remain compliant with the law, rarely
mention or describe in a meaningful way the role or importance of race in college admissions.
The erasure of race and racism in college admissions can be seen in the ways that college
admission offices describe admission officer responsibilities. For instance, one public university
admission office from the Midwest specified that their “office is charged with attracting,
recruiting, admitting, and enrolling a talented and geographically diverse undergraduate student
body” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, April 24, 2020). Another university expressed
that “the Admissions Officer is responsible for the daily management of a geographic region to
recruit, evaluate and enroll an academically accomplished and diverse student body to the
college” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, January 31, 2020). Finally, a private
religiously affiliated college in the Northeast indicated that “The role of the Assistant Director is
to work independently and as a member of a team within the Office of Undergraduate Admission
with a goal of enrolling the most competitive and diverse first- year class possible”
(HigherEdJobs, personal communication, February 21, 2021). You will notice in the excerpts
provided above that admission offices rarely defined how they operationalized diversity. Given
the critical role job descriptions play in transmitting the values and beliefs of an admission office
to prospective staff, one can imagine that admission offices made strategic decisions about what
information was worthy of inclusion. The lack of specificity about how diversity is defined is an
example of what Mueller (2020) describes as “nondeclarative practices that express logics
“without much comment” (p. 13).
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Furthermore, in the excerpts provided above, a “diverse class” is often qualified in some
way i.e., “talented and geographically”, “academically accomplished”, or “most competitive”.
These terms illustrate the porous nature of the socially constructed racial and socioeconomic
boundaries in college admissions. These boundaries are permeable by design in order to facilitate
the selective inclusion of marginalized groups. The selective inclusion of Black, Latinx, and low-
income students allows for the myth of meritocracy and procedural fairness to persist despite
enrollment data and news stories that indicate otherwise (Chetty et al., 2017; Tilly, 1998). The
commitments to building a diverse class found in these job descriptions may be interpreted as
“technical ceremonies” that privilege performances that are visible to appease the public
(Yurkofsky, 2020). An admission office must publicly commit to building a diverse class in order
to recruit prospective students and maintain legitimacy amongst their peers in the field. From a
racialized organizations perspective (Ray, 2019), the absence of specific recruitment or
admission strategies to diversify the applicant and admitted student pools in staff job descriptions
decouples admission office routines from university commitments to expand the enrollment of
racially minoritized groups. In the next section, we will turn our attention to the assistant,
associate, or director of multicultural recruitment role. In these positions, recruitment practices
were more tightly coupled to a university’s diversity goals.
From Decoupled to Tightly Coupled Constructing Multicultural Admissions
Sociologist Victor Ray (2019) argues that one mechanism in racialized organizations that
contributes to the maintenance and reproduction of inequality is the decoupling of routine
organizational practice from formal commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Approximately 15% of the position descriptions analyzed in the sample included specific text
that outlined distinct organizational practices that were intentionally designed to enhance
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diversity. Moreover, those positions that included clearly delineated tasks and responsibilities
that were tightly coupled with a university’s equity goals were often assistant or associate
directors of admissions that were formally charged with leading “multicultural recruitment”
initiatives.
Whereas admission officer roles frequently failed to define “diverse,” multicultural
recruitment positions often began with organizational definitions of the “diverse” student groups
those positions were designed to serve. For instance, one multicultural admissions counselor
position in the Southeast noted that the individual was responsible for “assisting with the
planning and implementation of on-and off-campus recruiting activities for historically
underrepresented groups” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, July 1, 2020). Additionally,
a private university in the Northeast specified that the associate director of outreach was
responsible for “direct[ing] university-wide enrollment efforts for special populations, including
the recruitment, selection, and enrollment of underrepresented minority students (including
BIPOC and first-generation college students)” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, July 1,
2020). How these institutions define diversity challenges existing practices that maintain the
racial and socioeconomic boundaries commonly found in college admissions. Constructing a
specific role and identifying a target audience are attempts by these organizations to formally
redistribute resources and institutionalize organizational practices that will ultimately expand the
college options available to historically marginalized groups.
The multicultural admission officer positions in the sample included tasks and
responsibilities that attempted to structure how college admission offices interact with Black,
Latinx, or low-income students. For example, a private urban college in the Northeast included
the following:
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The admissions counselor will be a member of the access and diversity portfolio with
responsibility to co-lead the planning and execution of the fall fly-in program; co-lead the
undergraduate diversity admissions council; act as lead for Native student recruitment
and collaborate with the director of admissions for access and outreach on staff training,
communications, and partnerships. (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, June 21,
2020)
The inclusion of text that indicated that admission officers were responsible for establishing
partnerships to reach diversity and equity goals was present in many of the multicultural
admission counselor job descriptions in the sample. One private liberal arts college noted that
their director of multicultural recruitment would be responsible for “Provid[ing] significant
oversight of the college’s relationships with key community-based organizations, including
QuestBridge, Posse, and additional regional and/or short-term partnerships” (HigherEdJobs,
personal communication, 2021). Another university inserted text that their assistant director of
multicultural recruitment would “build and maintain productive working relationships with
college counselors and community-based organizations (CBOs) to establish a successful
recruitment campaign” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, July 1, 2020). Relationship
building with community-based organizations was one strategy that selective college admission
offices utilized to manage the tension between market and equity logics. The development of
partnerships with community-based organizations has a long history; it was first introduced as a
recruitment strategy by highly selective college admission offices during the Civil Rights era
(Karabel, 2005b). The presence of this practice in multiple job descriptions across the sample
demonstrates how college admission offices have attempted to institutionalize equity-minded
recruitment practices (Bensimon, 2018). We now turn our attention to multicultural admission
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officer roles, which is another strategy college admission offices utilize to manage the tension
between market and equity logics.
Hybridization of Equity and Market Logics
The construction of multicultural admission officer positions appears to be one way that
admission offices structurally managed the tension between market and equity logics.
Multicultural admission officer roles allowed admission offices the opportunity to address the
potential conflict between market logics and equity discourses by compartmentalizing equity
work through the creation of new positions, practices, and logics of action. In many of the offices
in this sample, the responsibilities of multicultural recruiter positions were intentionally
developed to ensure that colleges and universities were devoting recruitment resources to
marginalized groups. These roles may therefore provide a unique context to explore how equity
and market logics simultaneously operate in college admission offices.
In the section below, I describe how two different public institutions frame their response
to the equity versus excellence challenge, which is a reflection of how contradictions between
market and equity logics have traditionally been framed in higher education selection processes
(Lamont, 2009; Posselt, 2016). For example, one public university addresses the equity versus
excellence challenge by framing their multicultural recruitment team in ways that recognized that
excellence is a construct shaped by inequitable opportunity structures. This university stated that
the multicultural recruitment should “advocate for and support access, diversity, and inclusion
initiatives and programs that reach, advance, retain, and center the experiences of students from
historically marginalized backgrounds” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, June 21,
2020). The use of agentic terms such as “advocate for” and “center the experiences of students
from historically marginalized backgrounds” are more aligned with equity discourses that
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challenge individuals with power to leverage their resources in transformative ways. This public
university was an outlier in the data set, but in the aftermath of the racial justice protest of
summer 2020, many university admission offices have since developed recruitment plans that
include similar ideas.
Another public university framed multicultural recruiter roles in a very different way.
Their staff members were responsible for “Provid[ing] leadership in managing the day-to-day
activities of territory management for the University’s domestic recruitment of diverse and
academically qualified undergraduate students, within the framework of the university’s
enrollment targets and consistent with the mission and annual objectives of the admissions
office” (HigherEdJobs, personal communication, June 21, 2020). The use of “within the
framework of the university’s enrollment targets” and “annual objectives of the admissions
office” appear to be more aligned with the market perspectives traditionally found in the position
descriptions of admission officers who are not responsible for multicultural recruitment. How
can equity be achieved if the staff responsible for multicultural recruitment are accountable to the
same academic and revenue targets that are often responsible for the exclusion of Black, Latinx,
and low-income students?
According to Gross (2009), action is about problem-framing, and to understand what
goals organizations are driving toward, we must be attentive to the problems they are trying to
solve. In the first university above, it appears that the admissions office is aware of and
attempting to address structures that exclude students from marginalized groups. The use of
“marginalized backgrounds” is instructive here; it does not naturalize the underrepresentation of
students, or present it as the result of a lack of individual effort; rather, it focuses the problem on
what institutions have done—and, conceivably, can do. Equity logics by their very nature are
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designed to ask critical questions that bring organizations into the discussion of—and solutions
for—inequality.
In the second university example above, the use of “diverse and academically qualified
undergraduate students”, does quite the opposite. It appears to frame the diversity problem as one
that is the result of a lack of qualified applicants. This framing fails to recognize that individual
institutions define what is “academically qualified”—often relying on proximity to whiteness as
a credential (Ray, 2019)—to improve their status in the higher education marketplace. The higher
education marketplace as McMillan Cottom and Tuchman (2015) notes “trades in prestige,
which is protected by keeping students out” (p. 3). Market logics in this instance are collective
representations that shape what organizations see, how they communicate, how they problem
solve, and what actions they advise their staff to pursue.
Organizational ideas about equity evolve and are rearticulated through time and space.
Historically speaking, the roles that we now refer to as the assistant, associate, or director of
multicultural admissions were developed during the 1960s to respond to internal pressure from
students and external prodding from the Kennedy administration during the Civil Rights era
(Cole, 2020; Karabel, 2005a). University leaders created these positions to institutionalize and
codify admission practices that would expand the enrollment of excluded groups (Cole, 2020).
During the Civil Rights era, university and admission leaders took bold steps to challenge
existing practices and developed new programs and initiatives to expand the enrollment of
minoritized groups. While there are practices designed to expand equity that have persisted and
continue to influence admission offices today, the hyper-focus on SAT scores and private high
school attendance as markers of prestige may be limiting where admission offices are willing to
look to find talent.
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Discussion
In this chapter, I have explored how market and equity logics are operationalized and
institutionalized in college admission offices through job descriptions. Through the analysis of
job descriptions, I was able to investigate how the construction of the admission officer role and
the configuration of responsibilities contained within them have become durable structures that
allocate recruitment resources in ways that advantage dominant groups. For many admission
officers at highly selective colleges and universities, selecting which high schools should receive
a school visit during recruitment season is a daunting task that is often constrained by the formal
rules and policies outlined in their position descriptions. Through a discourse analysis of 150
admission officer position descriptions, 100 college admission websites, and 25 private high
school counseling web pages I learned a great deal about the pivotal role that admission offices
play in designing an ecosystem that diminishes the agency that admission officers are afforded in
their roles.
In most organizations in society, discourse precedes action. Scholars have argued that
inequality follows a similar pattern and is both discursive and agentic (Fields & Fields, 2012;
Hall, 2017). That is, ideas and language shape practice, which in turn can reinforce higher level
logics that are, in part, discursive. In order for inequality to persist, those in positions of power
must create or reinforce discourses to naturalize its existence (Bonilla-Silva, 2018; Hall, 2017;
Tilly, 1998). In college admission settings, debates about who is admissible, who is prepared, and
who is the ideal or typical applicant can all been seen as attempts to create shared discourses that
can be “rationales for action” (Fields & Fields, 2012, p. 17). Ball (1993) argues that discourses
are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (p. 14). Job descriptions
are one mechanism that admission offices utilize to construct the realities they speak. Across the
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150 job descriptions that I analyzed, I found the construction of shared discourses about
organizational identity, clear patterns in the perceived role and purpose of off-campus
recruitment, discourses about organizational status, as well as language highlighting
commitments to diversity. With these discourses encoded in formal job descriptions, college
admission offices shape norms, establish expectations and direct the activity of admissions staff
(Björninen et al., 2020). In my analysis, I found that off-campus recruitment practices were a key
mechanism that admission offices utilized to institutionalize the exclusion of high schools that
serve high concentrations of Black, Latinx, and low-income students (Bonilla-Silva, 1997).
Charles Mills (1998) posits that “racial exclusion, its long history ignored, has been
accommodated by the categories of deviation and anomaly rather than being seen, as it should
be, as normative, [and] central to the system” (p. 137). I take Charles Mills’ call seriously and
genuinely believe that our discussions of the racial and socioeconomic stratification of higher
education must see inequality as normative and central. If we are committed to understanding
inequality in the modern era, we must pay attention to organizational discourse because tensions
about issues of selectivity and equity, for instance, are often debated and negotiated through the
production of organizational text (Ball, 1993). In this chapter, I hope that I have described how
college admission offices have normalized and institutionalized the exclusion of Black, Latinx,
and low-income students from highly selective colleges and universities through discourses that
justify routine off-campus recruitment practices.
I found that market logics were at the center of admissions work in my analysis. In the
job descriptions, I analyzed in this study, market logics and the theories, frames, and narratives
associated with them (McDonough & Robertson, 2012; Purdy et al., 2019) were designed to
“provide the socially constituted, self-regulating mechanisms that enact institutions and shape
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[the] individual behavior” of college admission professionals (Phillips et al., 2004, p. 635). In an
enrollment marketplace where students can choose from over 4,000 competitors, “selectivity”
becomes a status marker that serves as a shortcut for quality. With the rise of academic
capitalism and neoliberal perspectives in higher education, market logics have transformed
admission work in ways that require institutions to compete for the “best and brightest” students
(Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). In many ways, the search for the “best and brightest” is tied to
protecting one’s status in a highly stratified higher education marketplace. Status is also a key
resource that educational institutions use to attract a market share of applicants who bring
qualities they desire, such as high levels of academic preparation and the ability to pay full
tuition. Status and selectivity go hand in hand; therefore, selectivity is one self-regulating
mechanism that I would like to draw special attention to because of the power it holds in shaping
the cognitive frames of institutional leaders and enrollment management professionals
(Bensimon, 2005).
Selectivity, as an organizational identity, was one of the primary ways market logics were
discussed in the job descriptions in this sample. As a core element of an admission office’s
identity, selectivity engendered a series of responsibilities that were intended to ensure that
admission officers conducted their work in identity congruent ways (Oyserman, 2009). The
prioritization of private preparatory schools, who share similar elite status, for off-campus
recruitment visits can be considered an identity congruent practice (Gordon, 2013; Salazar et al.,
2021).
For many college admission offices, selectivity (Bastedo & Bowman, 2011; Slaughter &
Rhoades, 2004) is a status marker that provides them with material rewards (e.g., increased
applications, enrollment stability, etc.). Markets are socially constructed and are defined in part
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by the perceptions of individuals in the marketplace (Podolny, 1993). Scholars in sociology and
higher education have found time and time again that the social status of the organizations often
mediates access to information and the transfer of individuals between organizations (Bourdieu,
1987; McDonough, 1997; Rivera, 2015). In the position descriptions in the sample and on
several admission office websites I reviewed, a high school or community-based organization’s
status influenced whom students and counselors had access to. For example, on college
admission pages where territory assignments were public, private preparatory schools were often
designated as special constituencies with dedicated staff who were often in leadership positions.
School status also appeared to shape expectations admission offices had about whether
particular high schools could produce applicants for admission. This was often evident in the
ways community-based organizations were referenced or named in position descriptions.
Community-based organizations were often described as a source for recruiting students from
racially minoritized or low-income backgrounds. The inclusion of community-based
organizations as one of the prominent strategies for recruiting students of color communicates
inherent status beliefs about the ability of high schools that serve high concentrations of Black,
Latinx, and low-income students to produce potential applicants. Ridgeway (2013) posits that
status beliefs “about group differences create material inequalities by introducing systemic biases
in who people prefer for association and exchange” (p. 6). This finding extends the work of
Salazar et al. (2021) and identifies one mechanism for how the racialization process in off-
campus recruiting occurs.
The discourse on community-based organizations and the creation of the multicultural
admissions officer position highlights two means by which admission offices managed the
tension between market and equity logics. The development of relationships with community-
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based organizations appears to be one strategy that college admission offices utilize to manage
the internal conflict of market logics and equity discourse. Dolbec et al. (2022) claim that
organizations utilize hybridization to resolve the internal conflict associated with competing
institutional logics. The hybridization of logics in organizations typically occurs in two ways:
organizations may separate logics through compartmentalization, or they may integrate logics
through new organizational structures or, in this case, new routines. In the job descriptions in the
sample, many admission offices compartmentalized equity work through the creation of
multicultural admission officer positions. By design, multicultural admission officer positions
allow admission offices to separate tasks and pursue their equity goals and objectives without
changing institutionalized routines (McCambly & Colyvas, 2022). The hybridization of logics
can be seen in the relationship building with CBOs; this practice integrated market and equity
logics by focusing attention on students from minoritized groups with high SAT scores and GPAs
and had been coached on the intricacies of selective college admissions. This practice allowed
admission offices to pursue their equity goals without the need to improve or address inequitable
admission or recruitment practices. In the highly selective admissions context, hybridization and
compartmentalization rarely challenged the status quo. Hybridization and compartmentalization
did not reconfigure structures, redistribute resources, or empower groups in ways that would
challenge the power relations between highly selective college admission offices and high
schools that served high concentrations of Black, Latinx, and low-income students (McCambly
& Colyvas, 2022; Posselt, 2020). Collectively, these findings add new insights to the emerging
discourse on college admission recruitment practices.
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Conclusion
In highly selective colleges and universities, market and equity logics are overarching
mediating systems that shape how admission officer roles are constructed and structure how
admission recruitment decisions are made. Through job descriptions, admission offices focus the
attention and influence staff behavior in ways that are aligned with their “institutional goals”
(King & Whetten, 2008). As goal-directed entities, admission offices define their organizational
identity, structure, and activities (Fiol, 2002). Many of the admission offices in the sample
constructed their staff roles in ways that privilege students that are overrepresented in the halls of
highly selective colleges and universities.
In this chapter, I explored how admission offices structured staff roles and sought to
institutionalize practices (e.g., high school visits, college fairs) that were designed to influence
the behavior of prospective students, counselors, and their families (Jaworski, 2000). Through
the analysis of job descriptions, I was able to investigate how the construction of the admission
officer role and the configuration of responsibilities within them have become durable structures
that allocated recruitment resources in ways that advantage dominant groups. For many
admission officers at highly selective colleges and universities, selecting which high schools
should receive a school visit during recruitment season is a daunting task, one that is often
constrained by the formal rules and policies outlined in their position descriptions. Through a
discourse analysis of 150 admission officer position descriptions, 100 college admission
websites, and 25 private high school counseling web pages, I learned a great deal about the
pivotal role that admission offices played in designing an ecosystem that institutionalized
inequality (McCambly & Colyvas, 2022).
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The analysis of job descriptions in this chapter was designed to elucidate the
organizational contexts that guide and provide meaning for the recruitment behaviors we will
discuss in the next chapter. Institutional logics are inhabited; that is to say, they are made real by
the actions of admissions staff. They are present in the narratives that are told, in the theories that
guide action, and in the frames that shape understanding. In the next chapter, I will explore how
admission officers bring the job descriptions analyzed in this discourse analysis to life.
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Chapter Five: Inhabiting Market and Equity Logics
Through their work developing travel schedules, admission officers are engaged in a
sensemaking process in which they take abstract principles—such as directives to advance
diversity or to build a class that displays academic excellence—and turn them into concrete
actions that meet local goals and objectives (Weick et al., 2005). This process reflects the duality
of agency and structure, a perennial tension in the theory and research of organizations. This
chapter explores how individual admission officers inhabit this debate. On the one hand, the role
and purpose of high school visits are structured by an individual admission office’s social,
cultural, and historical contexts. The institution’s values, leadership, and social position within
the higher education marketplace play a critical role in shaping an individual admissions office’s
recruitment strategy and, as I will argue, market logics dominate the development of off-campus
recruitment schedules. Through job descriptions, formal policies, admission websites, and public
statements, admissions offices utilize their power to define what is real, what is relevant, and in
this context specifically, which types of students are worthy of attention and courting during the
college admission travel recruitment season. It is within this constellation of structures that
admission officers make daily choices with consequences for equity and diversity. And as I will
argue, within this sample, diversity frames and equity logics also motivate daily decisions.
Examining how admission officers develop their off-campus recruitment schedules
provides an opportunity to explore three fundamental lines of inquiry that will expand what we
know about every day admission practices that may influence the application and enrollment
patterns of marginalized groups in higher education. Recruitment schedules can provide insight
about and explanations regarding (a) which communities or groups of high school students
receive attention in routine college admission recruitment practices; (b) the ways that colleges
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direct their attention to racialized and classed groups of high school students; and (c) for what
purposes they direct their attention as they do.
Through analysis of my conversations with college admission officers at selective
colleges and universities, I found that the highly ritualized nature of college admission
recruitment activity led to the development of recruitment schedules that adhered to the taken-
for-granted theories, narratives, and frames—about student admissibility, likelihood to succeed,
or ability to pay—that have diffused across the admissions profession since it was formally
developed in 1920. These widely diffused, taken-for-granted theories, narratives, and norms
about students and the schools that serve them shape how individual admission officers assess
whether a high school should be added to their fall recruitment schedule. As an artifact, the travel
schedule is a representation of institutional priorities, values, and assessments of worth. In a K-
12 education system where high schools are stratified by race and socioeconomic status, these
assessments of worth are essentially racial and socioeconomic valuations or social identity (i.e.,
race and/or class) based judgments about the economic value of prospective students (Erigha,
2021). As an organizational practice, the decision to visit a high school is an evaluative judgment
of worth. The social ties that are formed between high schools and colleges as a result of these
evaluations by admission officers is one reason the high school a student attends consequential
and determines whether students are recognized and courted by highly selective colleges and
universities (Khan, 2012; Selingo, 2020).
In this chapter, I begin by laying out the role and purpose of off-campus recruitment and
then proceed into a discussion about how an admission officer’s institutional context shapes how
they approach scheduling recruitment visits. I then provide an analysis of the role that market
and equity logics play in structuring the off-campus recruitment activity of admission officers. I
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conclude the chapter with a discussion of the tension that market logics pose for professionals
who are invested in advancing equity and inclusion in college admissions.
Off-Campus Recruitment and the College Admissions Interaction Order
How individual admission officers come to define and understand the role and purpose of
off-campus recruitment activities is critical for understanding how admission offices make race
and socioeconomic status relevant and meaningful—that is, how they operate as racialized
organizations. Their interactions with prospective students and their meaning-making about the
process that facilitated those interactions provide a foundation for bringing admission officers
into the conversation about the racial and socioeconomic stratification of higher education. In
college admissions, the interactions that admission officers have or do not have with prospective
students are what Erving Goffman (1983) describes as “interaction orders,” which are socially
situated domains in which individuals come into contact with one another for prescribed
purposes. They are important because “a great deal of the work of organizations—decision
making, the transmission of information, the close coordination of physical task—is done face to
face” (Goffman, 1983, p. 8). For Goffman, interactions were worthy of examination because of
the potential effect they have on individual life outcomes. For this research, interactions of
admission officers and high school students are worthy of examination because of the potential
effect they have on application and enrollment outcomes.
For many of the individual admission officers across the sample, high school visits were
interactions that provided the opportunity to build relationships with students, counselors, and
communities. For example, when describing the importance of off-campus recruitment visits one
admission officer from a liberal arts college in the northeast shared that “a lot of this work is
relationship building; you go to the same school to develop relationships.” Another admission
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officer from a small liberal arts college shared that “being the only admission officer that’s going
to a school can create a very positive relationship [between] students and a counselor and open
their eyes to higher education, and specifically, the school that you work for.” When describing
the role of high school visits, an admission officer from a large public flagship shared that
throughout the travel season admission officers “build relationships with students over the time
that you’re, you know, working with them through the application, and they tell you things that
they don’t necessarily feel comfortable putting in an application because they don’t know who’s
reading it.” For many of the admission officers in the sample, the relationships built with
students and counselors during the travel season aided them in generating applications that were
necessary for reaching the enrollment targets set for them by their supervisors.
Additionally, admission officers in the sample shared that relationships developed during
off-campus recruitment visits were helpful for learning more about individual students and their
school context. For example, one admission officer from a highly selective west coast university
shared that visiting high schools is useful for understanding “excellence in context.” This
admission officer went on to share that as admission officers visit high schools, they learn
information that could shape
How we read holistically. … It’s important to understand what someone is dealing with.
Being able to be in that space to really understand what is the context here? What does it
actually look like, around here? What are the actual resources if the school is big or what
have you, which, you know, I’m just trying to understand what is actually excellent in this
context?
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Given the importance of contextualization as a mechanism of holistic review that improves the
odds of admission for low-income students (Bastedo, et al., 2022), the importance of admission
officers developing relationships in a variety of high school contexts is hard to overstate.
In addition to relationship-building that generated applications and developed
contextualized understandings of applicants, admission officers identified high school visits and
off-campus recruitment activities more broadly as vehicles for sharing information about their
college or university. This is consistent with the findings from their job descriptions. One
admission officer when describing the interactions that occur during off-campus recruitment
visits shared “you know, you are here to present to these students to let them know that Selective
Private University is an opportunity [for them].” As admission officers described what occurred
in off-campus recruitment visits, they often shared stories of individual coaching they provided
to prospective students and their school counselors about ways to navigate the ins and outs of the
college admissions process. One admission officer explained:
I feel like a big piece in terms of [the] high school visit is just really being a resource to
students. Showcasing for students what the university is about, allowing them to see that,
you know, there’s someone there to work with them through [this] complex process. …
Being able to relate to them and to kind of see what their needs are, and how we can
better support them through the application [process].
“Being a resource,” in this case means “being able to relate to them” and provide needed
supports. Another admission officer described the individual coaching and attention students
received during high school visits:
And with this particular visit, there was a small group of about three seniors and one
junior. And we had a very candid conversation because it was such a small group, and it
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was less of a presentation but more of an opportunity for them to ask questions for us to
talk about the admissions process. I tried to be as straight, honest, and authentic as I could
be, which is kind of my model in this work.
The “informal coaching sessions” that occur as part of high school visits are invaluable for
students from minoritized communities. These intimate conversations with students who may
have had limited interactions with highly selective college admission professionals are an
essential tool for advancing equity in college admissions and serve as one example of how
admission professionals innovate and repurpose organizational routines (Seo & Creed, 2002).
While admission officers I interviewed saw the value and utility of the relationship-
building and information-sharing functions of off-campus recruitment activities, they were more
critical of off-campus recruitment activities as tools for reputation management. One admission
officer from a large southern state public flagship described the reputation management function
of high school visits when they described the importance of visiting public high schools that
served high concentrations of Black, Latinx, or low-income students.
But as far as the institution is concerned, they want press, they want to make sure that if
the [high] school is in their backyard, and it serves predominantly at-risk students that
they can at least say, “well, we visited, we’ve talked to them.” They can say, you know,
“they have an admissions representative that they can reach out to.” And this is even more
important if that school goes out of the state to recruit.
An admissions representative from an Ivy Plus college shared that the institution’s low
acceptance rates created an ideological challenge: Although it was important to visit schools and
community-based organizations that served high concentrations of students that are
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underrepresented in elite institutions, very few applicants from such backgrounds would be
admitted. This admission officer shared:
So, this is a problem. I would say, a conflict for me that I take personally when I’m doing
my outreach. We are tasked with making sure our proposals and our outreach serves
diversity broadly defined, right? So, then you choose all the schools that might be Title I,
you might go to these community-based organizations that focus on first-generation
college-going students and low-income students and that school is full of Black students,
and I’m standing in front of them, telling them again, that representation matters. … And
in the back of my head, I’m kind of thinking it is so selective, will anyone even get in?
Will one get in? I don’t know. ... Are we here doing more harm than good? This is the
conflict I have with the selective college admissions process.
This participant is raising questions about the value of targeted outreach programs if students
would ultimately be denied admission during the selection stage. This admission officer was
attempting to reconcile their belief in the importance of expanding diversity with the reality of
the competitive nature of selection processes at Ivy League colleges.
Similarly, an admissions officer from a selective liberal arts college described the tension
that application generating recruitment practices posed for them. This admission officer shared:
On the other side, [selective West Coast University] doesn’t have to do recruitment.
Because, as you know, people want to come here, and we’re probably unless something
dramatic happens, never not going to not have enough applications. But even though we
[are highly selective] we want to do more, we want to meet with 10 schools a day and
five CBOs next week, and all that great stuff. We [admission officers] are juggling so
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much that sometimes we are conflicted [about how much off-campus recruitment is
necessary].
As the quote suggests, developing fall travel schedules that incorporate high schools that will
yield few admits presents an ideological challenge for admission officers that are employed at
colleges that have significant application volume. Without the ability to change evaluation
processes, admission officers questioned whether it was right or fair to set students up for
disappointment at the admission stage.
To summarize, the primary purposes of high school visits and other off-campus
recruitment activities as expressed by admission officers were relationship building, developing
contextualized understandings of applicants, information sharing, and reputation management.
These purposes structured both interactions and decisions about where to conduct off-campus
recruiting.
Role of Institutional Context
Another set of structural influences on these decisions concerns the institutional context,
including the cultures of the campus and admissions office. These cultures affect how
commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion are operationalized. For example, when
describing the different information that institutions considered when constructing their travel
schedule, an admission officer from a small liberal arts college spoke about the institutional
culture as formative:
Some of those things where maybe the campus culture, cultural identity, kind of fits into
the admissions framework and drive. Some of those conversations [around identity and
campus culture] may go into types of schools and the types of communities that you
might lean towards [when building your travel schedule].
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In this statement the admission officer was describing how beliefs about who the “ideal
applicant” for a college was influenced ideas about the types of high schools you might visit. The
cultural matching that occurred between colleges and high schools that received visits was often
captured by some version of the adage “that is a good school for us,” and this sentiment was
shared in some way or form by approximately 40% of the admission officers in the sample. This
admission officer continued by adding that the recruitment schedule “can also be impacted by
just the very culture of the place that you’re working in.” When describing the difference
between their current employer’s commitments to diversity and other admission offices in the
field, an admissions officer from another selective liberal arts college echoed a similar sentiment,
“And I think, for some offices, there are cultural dynamics … I think there are definitely
admission offices with more of kind of an advocacy approach to their outreach.” This admission
officer continued to share that they believed that admissions offices who took on an “advocacy
approach” were “trying to create a more diverse class by putting a little bit more of an eye
towards those communities that have been traditionally underserved.” Across these two
examples, we see participants name both the campus culture and admissions office culture to be
influential in developing a travel schedule.
Several admission officers who espoused deep personal commitments to equity
mentioned that they chose to work at their current institutions for their commitments to equity.
When I inquired about how they assessed their university’s commitment to diversity prior to
accepting their position, one Black admission officer at a private liberal arts college shared,
“what’s in the actual mission statement of the university, and the college admission office’s
mission statement can tell you a lot about what they might be doing for any admission process as
well.” Another Black admission officer shared a similar sentiment when describing the role
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institutional context played in how admission officers conceptualized and operationalized
diversity. They noted:
How they talk about things like diversity and inclusion. Is it anywhere even on their
website? That’s how I know it is something that they care about. I think, on most colleges
websites it’s harder to find than on others. And so that can maybe tell you a little bit about
how some of those things matter for them.
Another participant explained that intentionality characterized their institutional context:
What I do appreciate about our office is our intentionality. And I think that goes along
with outreach and with the time constraints: we have to be intentional. But you know,
within that we are trying to think as deeply as we can about how to do outreach in the
service of, you know, diversity or equity or inclusion.
Across the sample, it was admission officers who drew on equity discourses that frequently
mentioned that one’s institutional context played a role in shaping how the admissions office and
officers operationalized their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Market Logics and the Development of Controlling Images
While the general purposes of off-campus recruitment activities were shared and the
influence of institutional context on decision making was clear, individual admission officers
made use of different logics and they often contested the meanings of the dominant logics in use
in their offices when constructing their travel schedules.
In fields like education, market logics orient institutional behavior in ways that pressure
universities to focus on consumer choice and competition (Dolbec et al., 2022). Scholars and
admission professionals have argued that over time market logics have transformed admissions
professionals from counselors to marketing professionals (McDonough & Robertson, 2012;
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Tremblay, 2013). Market logics as we know them today emerged in 1970s with the expansion of
enrollment management divisions (Coomes, 2000; Mathis, 2010).
Equity logics, on the other hand, are an alternative set of theories, frames, and narratives
that admission officers utilized to justify recruitment practices that provided resources and
information to communities that had been historically disadvantaged in highly selective college
admissions processes. Equity logics are separate and distinct from the diversity discourse that is
commonplace in college admissions because equity logics orient admission activity in ways that
recognize the role that admission offices play in the reproduction and maintenance of inequality
in higher education. For several of the admission officers in the sample, market logics were often
in direct conflict with the equity logics that were guiding their practice.
Scholars have long argued that the availability of contested meanings and multiple logics
in organizations can serve as vehicles for ingenuity on the part of staff (Pache & Santos, 2010;
Reay & Hinings, 2009; Scott, 2008; Thornton & Ocasio, 2008). In the sections that follow, I will
explore the multiple logics and frames present in college admissions and delve into how
admission officers utilized these conflicting logics and contested meanings to take action.
In highly selective colleges and universities, enrollment management concerns drive the
dominance of market logics that influence outreach, recruitment, admissions, and financial aid
decisions. Associated with these logics are theories, frames, and narratives about student
admissibility, ability to pay, and likelihood to enroll that come with them are often utilized to
naturalize and justify what many outside of the college admissions space would describe as
exclusionary recruitment practices. Admission professionals in the sample recognized that off-
campus recruitment activities and enrollment management marketing more broadly played a
crucial role in meeting their institution’s financial and reputational goals and objectives.
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In the college admissions offices represented in this sample, market logics were evident.
They functioned as top-down belief systems that shaped how individual admission officers
selected the high schools that were added to their travel schedule. One admission officer from a
private liberal arts college on the west coast described this process when they shared the
following: “In July, we’re given what is being asked of you [in terms] of expectations for
outreach.” Another admissions officer from a small liberal arts college described institutional
targets in shaping the travel schedule as “expectations that are happening outside of our office.”
When elaborating on the external expectations that shaped their decision-making, this same
admissions officer shared, “There are particular institutional priorities, because of mandates that
come down from the president’s or provost’s office where campus priorities are being set and so
these are the these are the goals that you have to meet.” For many admission officers, the
application and enrollment targets that were established for their territories played a significant
role in shaping decisions about which high schools they would visit during fall recruitment
season.
Socializing Market Orientation
Many of the admission officers I spoke to described staff training in ways that made it
clear to me that professional staff training served multiple organizational purposes, including the
inculcation of market logics. Staff training was one of the primary mechanisms that college
admission offices utilized to share market-oriented theories and narratives about admissibility,
ability to pay, or likelihood to enroll. In my conversations with admissions professionals, they
described staff training sessions and meetings where supervisors shared market-oriented
decision-making heuristics that steered them to prioritize high schools that were already well-
represented in their application and enrollment pools. One Asian-American admission officer
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described the sensegiving process (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991) that occurred in professional staff
training:
We have like a week-long training in our office and it kind of talks about various things,
there’s messaging from our director and various people in management about our
application data and how we can use that to take a look at like our various territories that
we visit.
In addition to messages about the types of high schools that yielded successful applicants and
enrollees, professional staff summer training was also frequently described as a place where
admission officers received directives that communicated “institutional priorities” and
enrollment targets that supervisors expected to be reflected in the schedules that admission
officers submitted for approval.
Quantification in the High School Classification System
Given the importance that off-campus recruitment activities played in the success of their
units and the university more broadly, many of the admissions professionals mentioned that they
were expected to justify their decision-making utilizing campus enrollment management
dashboards and predictive modeling systems. Over time, admission offices across the country
have developed robust predictive modeling systems to manage the volatility of college
enrollment patterns. These predictive models, often developed by enrollment management
consulting firms, are designed to maximize the enrollment of full-paying, high SAT scoring high
school students. These models generate enrollment targets for various types of students, which
focuses the attention of admission officers on particular types of students and high schools in
ways that often reify the racial and socioeconomic boundaries that have plagued highly selective
colleges and universities since their founding.
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In the age of big data, admissions offices and the staff within them have turned to big
data to ensure that their off-campus recruitment activities are aligned with the goals and
objectives set for their office by institutional leaders, such as the president or provost. For many
of the admission officers in the sample, recruitment schedules were developed using institutional
data about historical application or enrollment patterns, and custom-built reports that included
average SAT scores for high schools and predictions or “scores” about individual students’
ability and willingness to pay. One admission officer from a large highly selective public flagship
shared the following about the role that data played in developing their fall travel schedule:
But for me, when I started, the goal was to find those institutions where the students’
profiles fit the profiles of students who were typically admitted. So, they had to have
similar AP courses, they had to have similar like, you know, GPAs, they had to be well
off. So, if you’re going out of state and you’re visiting a school, you’re not visiting it for
press, you’re not visiting it to meet a quota. You’re visiting it because they can pay for an
out-of-state education. So, we went to a lot of private schools. A lot of boarding schools.
Another admission officer from a highly selective private school shared, “We are asked to think
about data and are constantly looking at our applications. I do a lot of pivot tables and looking at
queries about how many applications came from this certain school.” An admission officer from
a small liberal arts college expanded on the use of historical data about application and
enrollment:
So, I think the most important thing a lot of times is the history of enrollment. So those
schools that have a good history of their students, not only applying, but enrolling are
always going to be on the list. And a lot of that just has to do with the nature of the
finances of the college for many schools, tuition, and fees that students pay, or the
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funding that you can get from the government or other sources that go towards student
financial aid, really drive the ability to be able to pay the bills. So, because of that,
enrollment is the most important thing. So, you’re always going to have those high
schools, where you’re enrolling lots of students be on the list because they [those schools]
help finance the campus, they help pay the bills. So, that’s always an important
consideration.
From this participant, we see a clear explication of how application, enrollment, and finances are
intertwined—and how tracking these patterns via the high schools that students attend is critical.
In their interviews, admission officers acknowledged that the use of data in their
decision-making process often led to the development of schedules that rarely varied from year
to year. One admissions officer from a mid-Atlantic liberal arts college stated, “I understand the
thinking behind why we always go to the same schools. We have our traditional high schools on
the schedule each year and I get that it makes sense from a data perspective.” For several
admission officers, their office’s expectations about the use of data to justify their travel
schedules constrained their ability to engage high schools or community-based organizations that
served high concentrations of Black, Latinx, or low-income students.
Admissibility and the Ability to Pay
Theories and narratives about admissibility and the ability to pay influenced the decisions
that admission officers made about what high schools they would visit during recruitment
season. One participant framed the role that admissibility played in constructing her schedule in
the following way.
I am at a Research One. The most applied to institution in the country, right. So, there
was no firm benchmarks in terms of okay, well, we got this many applications in the
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school last year, we need this many this year. We knew that we we’re going to get
applications. Yeah, you can always go and try and get more if you wanted to. But I think
in in addition to just generating more applications, [recruitment] was about generating
more admits. When you look at the kind of tracking that we’ve done over the last 5 years
for each high school. We know that they will apply, but they are not getting in. So, you
need to be generating competitive applicants [in your recruitment outreach].
The distinction that outreach efforts should be focused on generating admits rather than
applications is consistent with those in Adams (2009) enrollment management choice model.
Adams argues that from an institutional perspective that enrollment management is designed to
“proactively identify, inform, and recruit [specific types] of students to the institution (p. 44). In
this statement the admission officer highlights that high schools that generate admits are one
specific constituency that admission officers must pay attention to when constructing their travel
schedules. Having discussed how admissibility shaped how admission officers constructed their
travel schedules, the next section will focus on how ability to pay influenced admission officers’
evaluations of high schools.
There was a sense amongst half of the participants that campus finances (enrollment
budget) and resources (e.g., money allocated for travel, staff time) influenced the decisions that
were made about which high schools they might visit during recruitment season. One admission
officer from a small liberal arts college suggested
That a lot of that just has to do with the nature of the finances of the college. For many
schools, tuition and fees that students pay, or the funding that you can get from the
government or other sources that go towards tuition and fees really drive the ability to be
able to pay the bills. And so, because of that the history of previous enrollment is the
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most important thing. And so naturally you’re going to go to those places [high schools]
that have high number of applications. And if you have a situation where students are
applying and not enrolling, you may try going to that school to inquire to better
understand, Okay, why are your students not choosing us? And what can we do to better
help students feel like this might be a good option for them?
From this admission officer, we can see a clear explanation of how the financial positioning of
their college influenced their decision-making. This was not uncommon among admission
officers in the sample, many admission officers shared that they prioritized visits to high schools
that had a history for sending applications. One interviewee from a midwestern private university
added nuance and depth to my understanding of the role that institutional finances played on
decision-making when they commented that
Because the increasing costs are excessive [pause]. I think it’s just creating a lot of strain
on [the financial aid budget] and it’s putting strain on the institution. There is wider range
of families that need financial aid, even just like some of it and then there are also
families that need most of it. You can only admit a few of those students [that need
significant financial help].
The theories and narratives about the strain that low-income students have on financial aid
budgets is widespread and diffuse in college admissions. In a 2022 interview with the Chronicle
of Higher Education, the President and CEO of NACAC echoed a sentiment that was shared by
many participants when he stated
You can’t bring in a more diverse class without increased financial aid, and institutions
never receive enough state and federal funds to offer enough. The more financial aid you
offer, the less tuition you take in. Until we tackle the issue of higher-education finance,
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the pressures of financial sustainability will always win over the desire to uphold
institutional mission and values.
For nearly all of the admissions professionals in the sample, the recruitment schedule was a
representation of the reality that as admission officers that they could “only admit a few” low-
income students. The idea that you could “only admit a few” was one of the challenges
associated with selective college admissions work. There were travel budgets and time
constraints that admission officers were constantly managing. One admission officer from a
private university on the west coast described this challenge succinctly when she noted that “we
can’t touch everybody as you know we’re limited by time, money, and things like that.” It was
evident in my conversations with admission officers that admissibility and ability to pay had
become “standards of qualification [that] now subtly play[ed] the role once performed overtly by
policies of racial exclusion (Bell, 1992, p. 174).
A common view amongst interviewees was that the history of enrollment was a critical
data metric that determined whether a high school would receive a visit. The history of
enrollment functioned as short hand in the interviews that sent signals about admissibility,
likelihood to enroll, and the ability to pay. As critical elements of market logics I would like to
take a moment to unpack what the history of enrollment means in this context. Admission
officers had access to troves of data on prospective students (e.g., who is likely to accept an offer,
what scholarship amount will entice a student to enroll, etc.) and the high schools they came
from in their enrollment management dashboards (Engler, 2021). If a high school had a
longstanding enrollment history, there was more certainty that a recruitment visit would yield
students who would enroll and could afford to pay. The history of enrollment was one data point
that was commonly used to provide justifications and rationales for the decisions that were made
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about whether individual high schools should receive a visit. The explanations provided by
college admission officers in the sample about the data they consulted to make decisions about
which high schools they would visit provided depth and nuance that clarified the relationship
between off-campus recruitment activities and the macro-level outcomes that have been observed
about inequality in off-campus recruitment (Gordon, 2013; Leingang, 2019; Salazar et al., 2021).
Having explored how market logics shape admission officer decision-making, I will now move
on to discuss how ideas about diversity, equity, and inclusion in college admissions influence
how admission officers construct their off-campus recruitment schedules.
Framing Diversity in College Admissions
How admission offices talk about or frame diversity can serve as a window into
motivations for their policies and practices. Diversity discourse and frames also shape how
admission professionals understand the role race and socioeconomic status should perform in the
college admissions recruitment process. Sarah Ahmed (2007), in The Language of Diversity,
writes, “What makes diversity useful also makes it limited: it can become detached from
histories of struggle for equality” (p. 235). In many ways, the language of diversity in college
admissions has succumbed to Ahmed’s assertion. Jurisprudence in court cases such as Grutter v
Bollinger and the marketization of diversity by universities has led to the creation of diversity
frames that are focused on the development of a first-year class that meets field expectations for
representational diversity rather than the development of admissions practices that challenge the
racial and socioeconomic stratification of higher education (Ahmed, 2007; Berrey, 2015; Slay,
2017; Thomas, 2020). In the analysis that follows, I explain how admissions professionals
understand and operationalize their university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion goals as they
execute their recruitment responsibilities.
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When responding to interview prompts about how diversity, equity, and inclusion were
operationalized in their office, several admission officers shared what the job descriptions
analyzed in Chapter 4 communicated—that diversity was “broadly defined.” One Black
admission officer from a highly selective private university on the West shared:
When I think about what my dean and these leaders are saying when they say we want
diversity, is diversity broadly defined. I start thinking about how that word is used, kind
of willy-nilly, it’s not holding as much weight as it used to, and people are just using it to
sound good. Even though I know the right intentions are there to create a class full of
different folks, different experiences, different locations, you know, all that.
Other admission professionals in the sample expressed similar concerns about the broad diversity
discourse that was used in the college admissions profession. A Black admissions officer from a
public university in a Mid-Atlantic state compared external framing and other organizational
realities:
If I’m being honest. I felt the same way I always do, from an admission officer
perspective, there is tension, where it’s like, okay, on the outside, you say that we’re
doing this because we want to, you know, increase the diversity of our student population.
We want [students] to be able to learn from people who see the world differently than
[they] do…But are [they] really learning from people who see the world differently than
[they] do in terms of [the diversity of] geographic origin. Because a lot of the kids that get
into Public Flagship University and then go to Public Flagship University can afford to
pay for it and have had a certain set of advantages throughout their life, that makes it an
easy transition for them to attend our college. And whether you’re out of state or in-state,
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if that [the ability to pay] is the underlying, you know, denominator, then how different is
the experience really going to be for students that attend?
This admission officer felt that the diversity discourse in use in college admission offices was
frequently compromised by market logics focused on the prioritization of full-paying students
and cosmetic diversity markers such as geographic location. A White admission officer from a
large private university in the Southwest shared similar concerns, and stated that campus
leadership’s focus on legacy students contradicted the institution’s messaging about the
importance of diversity. This admission officer expressed the following when asked what
campus leadership was looking for when building the first-year class:
Taking into consideration, you know, being a private institution, sometimes they are
considering, of course, numbers of students from [racially] minoritized groups, or first-
generation students, but at the same time, they are also considering legacy students. For
me, this is really frustrating.
Legacy admissions is one example of how market and equity logics conflict. Admission directors
defending the practice often assert that legacy admissions practices serve the financial priorities
of institutions (Dario, 2021; Foley, 2021). This admission officer’s frustration appeared to stem
from the recognition that legacy students were often wealthy and White and that special
considerations for legacy students conflict with the university’s espoused commitments to
diversity (Bero, 2021; Hurwitz, 2011).
Several admission officers in the sample challenged institutional framings of diversity as
it concerned the creation of a class. They believed that the broad framings of diversity that were
widely diffused among college admission professionals did very little to ensure that the admitted
first-year class included students who were from racially minoritized or low-income
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backgrounds, who have been historically excluded from highly selective colleges or universities.
For example, an admission officer from a large public flagship institution acknowledged that
diversity discourses were applied in ways that decoupled daily admission practice from her
university’s commitments to equity. She shared the following when speaking about the
importance of diversity when building the travel schedule:
In my own personal experience, when I started in the field, nobody really talked about it
[importance of diversity when building a travel schedule]. So, you kind of get
indoctrinated into, like, okay, well, this is how this goes. So, this time, I’ll do it this way.
As I got higher up into [the admissions] world, I started to ask more questions. And I
started to pick the brains of people that were a little younger than me. I would ask
questions like, ‘okay, well, how do you go about choosing these schools? Are you going
to ensure that if you go to the school, you’re not just talking to all White students?’
Because that’s not necessarily why you’re going there. It’s not just about getting
somebody from the state of Texas. It is also about getting people who have different
experiences in Texas.
This admission officer describes how diversity, equity, and inclusion were rarely discussed by
her colleagues and that her recruitment work was decoupled from practice. As her experience in
the field grew, this admission officer took it upon herself to invite her colleagues to think about
ways that they might recouple recruitment practices with the equity discourses present in their
admission office. Several of the admission officers in the sample recognized that the broad
framings of diversity in use in their offices were happy talk that rarely led to reconfigurations of
structures or changes to routine practice (Bell & Hartmann, 2007).
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Another admission officer from a public university in the Southeast also shared how the
broad framing of diversity discourse in her admission office presented challenges for her as a
staff member. She stated:
Now that I’m, you know, higher up in this work. I think my challenge is receiving mixed
messages from senior leadership. So forward-facing, we say things like, well, we want to
make sure we believe in diversity and inclusion and we’re diversifying our student
population by reaching out to those students who come from those backgrounds that are
disadvantaged. But then on the back end, on the side that the public doesn’t see, it’s about
money. Who can afford to pay for this degree?
As was also described earlier, and which others have asserted as a mechanism of reproducing
racial inequality in organizations (Posselt, 2016; Ray, 2019), public commitments to diversity
frequently are decoupled from organizational priorities in practice (Austen, 2016).
The frames for diversity described by admission officers in this study—broadly defined
and often contradicting other institutional imperatives– align well with previous higher education
research while shedding new light on frames within admissions offices, specifically. Natasha
Warikoo defines frames as “lenses through which we “observe,” “interpret,” and respond to
social phenomena, and these frames shape how we understand the world and act within it” (p.
45). In college admissions, I found that campus diversity frames function as what Goffman
(1974) termed as “guided doings,” providing admission offices and the staff within them with
standards to guide their decisions, including their off-campus recruitment activities (p. 22). The
tension of diversity frames and market logics described by several of the admission professionals
in this sample was facilitated by the pressure for admission officers to resolve the contradictions
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between the diversity discourses shared by their leaders and the market-oriented recruitment
practices that were expected of them.
Equity Logics
It is against this backdrop of diversity framing and market pressures that equity logics
come to play an important role in admission officers’ work. I found that equity logics were
creative innovations that admission officers developed to manage the contradictions they
experienced as they navigated their roles (Pache & Santos, 2010; Reay & Hinings, 2009). Equity
logics, as I conceive of them, are meaning systems developed in situ by college admission
professionals that provide admissions professionals with alternative interpretations of the role
and purpose of off-campus recruitment activities. Equity logics motivate admission officers to
allocate resources in ways that (a) recouple admissions practice with diversity discourses; (b)
enhance rather than diminish the agency of racially and economically excluded student groups;
and (c) are attuned to the structural disadvantage experienced by racially minoritized and low-
income students in the college admissions process (Ray, 2019). In the sections that follow, I will
explore how the elements equity logics outlined above were inhabited and enacted by the
enrollment management professionals in the study.
Admission officers who embraced equity logics often described the role and purpose of
off-campus recruitment activities in ways that resisted the controlling images that defined Black,
Latinx, and low-income students as incapable of succeeding in the highly selective college
admissions process (Collins, 2009). While these admission officers generally believed in the role
and purpose of off-campus recruitment activities, they often described their approach for
selecting high schools in ways that demonstrated that the dominant theories, frames, and
narratives in use in their respective offices and the field more broadly needed to be contested.
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These admission officers were especially attuned to the disparities present in college admission
recruitment practices because of their own experiences navigating the college admission process.
When describing how the role and purpose of high school visits varied among admission
officers, one admission officer shared, “the purpose of going is twofold; it often depends on the
recruiter and the institution.” This admission officer described how admission officers’ social
identities and personal experiences might shape how they approach selecting high schools during
travel season. Speaking from their personal experience, this admission officer shared:
The recruiter, if they are someone like me who is deeply invested in doing this work, for
the purpose of providing access to more students of color, is going because [they] were
once a student at that type of school, who took advantage of all the opportunities that
were available there and even went outside of the school to take advantage of course
opportunities.
Another admission officer in the sample shared a similar sentiment, and noted that the
prioritization strategy in use at their institution required revision. Upon reflection of their own
experience navigating the college admission process, they realized that very few colleges or
universities had demonstrated an interest in her as a prospective student. This admission officer
shared, “I didn’t have anybody come to my school and tell me that I was good enough to apply.
So, I’m going to be that person and go there and tell them you’re good enough to apply.”
Scholars have argued that organizational decision-making can be influenced by the social
identities and experiences of actors (Bowman & Bastedo, 2018; Lamont, 2009; Lok, 2010),
across these two examples admission officers worked their identities and personal experiences
into their everyday work.
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Representation Matters
During interviews several participants mentioned the importance of diversifying the
representation of staff present in their offices and in the college admissions field more broadly.
One admissions leader responsible for staff hiring noted that when hiring future staff, he and his
team would often discuss how they could use hiring as an opportunity to give voice to
communities that were not currently represented in their office. He shared, “one of the things that
we think about when we’re hiring volunteers or hiring some of our paid staff positions is okay,
what is representation? What voices are being heard? What voices aren’t being heard that we
need to actively recruit, to be a part of this space?” In describing why this practice was
necessary, this admission officer noted “who we hire tells the story of the entire campus in a way
that honors all the different voices and narratives that exist here.”
In describing why increasing representation mattered to her, another admission officer
shared: “I realized that it is so important for me to be able to tell somebody that comes from an
experience like mine, that West Coast Large Private University is an option.” Another admission
officer, when describing why they remain in the profession despite all the challenges, explained,
“What keeps me going is that it is important for my voice to be here…You need to have people
in this office or in these spaces that are from these communities that you are [trying to be]
connected with.” Additionally, another admission officer from a highly selective liberal arts
college spoke about the power of representation, broadly:
I came to the conclusion that representation matters…When we are standing in front of
students. It matters whether we are doing our discover [selective west-coast college]
presentations on campus or whether we are doing outreach at schools where there are
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majority-black students, students of color, low-income students, or first-generation
students.
For these three admission professionals, increasing diversity in the admissions office staff would
enhance the agency and perhaps, instill a sense of possibility for students from historically
excluded groups by allowing them to see someone from their community present in the
admissions office. Ray (2019) notes that “one’s position in racialized organizations shapes
agency” (p. 11), and in a college admission process where prospective students are assessing
campus climate, the presence or absence of admission officers that share their backgrounds may
go a long way in determining whether they apply.
Empowering Prospective Students
Admission officers employing equity logics also redefined the role and purpose of
recruitment visits in ways that might empower students and counselors by sharing information
that they knew many students from marginalized communities may need. Almost three-fourths of
the admission officers rejected deficit-oriented framings of why students from Black, Latinx, and
low-income communities were underrepresented in highly selective colleges and universities,
and they sought to reverse this trend by adding schools that had high concentrations of students
from racially minoritized and low-income communities to their schedule. In explaining why this
approach was necessary, one admission officer shared:
So, if I’m going to schools where you know, they’re economically disadvantaged, or not,
even economically, they have compound disadvantages, I need to first build a baseline of
confidence in this group that they should even be thinking about applying to a particular
institution.
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In this statement, the admission officer redefined the purpose of recruitment visits from
information sharing to confidence building. For this admission officer, recruitment visits were a
tool for challenging and disrupting the controlling images that prevented students from racially
minoritized and low-income backgrounds from applying.
Information sharing and confidence building may go hand in hand toward empowerment.
Another admission officer shared that her approach for selecting schools included identifying
high schools that served high concentrations of Black, Latinx, or low-income students and which
had sent multiple applications, but whose students were not admitted. They shared:
How I prioritize [schools] is I think about the schools that I have not been to. They sent
five students [applications] but all five students did not go as hard as they should have.
Let me go and connect with that counselor or let me go and talk to those students.
Recruitment visits were opportunities to provide students and counselors from
marginalized communities with information to strengthen their applications. It was her
experience that the applications that students submitted did not highlight their full potential.
When she stated that student applications “did not go as hard as they should have,” she was
drawing attention to the mismatch between how students presented themselves and the
expectations that highly selective colleges had for applicant portfolios. This re-articulation of the
information-sharing function of off-campus recruitment visits by this admissions counselor is
attuned to and attempts to disrupt the cumulative disadvantage Black, Latinx, and low-income
students experience in the highly selective college admissions process.
Envisioning a Different Future
I concluded my interviews with admission officers by asking each of them what they
would change about selective college admissions. My belief was that freeing admission officers
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from the constraints of a discussion about current processes within their offices might raise
issues that I had not considered. While the responses were broad ranging, there were two
individual responses that I believe provide distinctive insights about the challenges and
opportunities for the future off-campus recruitment. One interviewee suggested the following
If I could wave my magic wand, I would push a little bit more for [off-campus
recruitment visits] to help folks gain more knowledge about selective admission
[processes]. I would propose that we lean more into helping folks gain knowledge about
selective admissions instead of going to schools to talk solely about our university. I think
we’re very aware that we are selective and then not everybody will get in. So, how can
outreach look a little bit different in our context? What can be the purpose of visits if the
goal wasn’t just to enroll students?
This view was echoed by another participant who expressed that if he could change one thing
about the travel schedule that he would like to see more outreach to high schools that serve
students that are underrepresented at his institution. He stated
I think more outreach could always be a helpful thing. I would especially like to see more
outreach to underserved communities schools that we don’t typically visit because a lot of
times, being the only admission officer that’s going to a school can create a very positive
relationship between those students and an admission counselor. It [referencing high
school visits] can open their eyes to higher education, and specifically, the school that you
work for.
This same admission officer went on to elaborate that there needed to be a mindset shift away
from marketing specific institutions but rather to a process that counsels and educates students
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about selective college admission processes more broadly. He noted that it was important for his
institution to visit new high schools
not just for the publicity standpoint, but maybe there’s an opportunity here to educate
students. There’s not a lot of colleges that are going and visiting these [types of] students.
We do not necessarily need them to enroll or even apply to Northeastern Liberal Arts
College but maybe we can kind of create some energy in this area around the college
going process.
When asked about what they would change about recruitment, the participants were nearly
unanimous in the view that admissions offices should do more to connect with Black, Latinx,
and low-income students that were underrepresented at their institutions.
Discussion
For a high school to be selected for an off-campus recruitment visit means an opportunity
for its students and counselors to receive symbolic capital that can be transferred into material
rewards in the selective college admissions process (Bourdieu & Nice, 2005). In my discussions
with admission officers, I found that high school visits provided opportunities for students to
receive coaching about the application process. High school visits also provided opportunities for
students to develop personal relationships with counselors who might advocate for them in the
later stages of the selection process. For college admission counselors, high school visits were a
mechanism for providing prospective students with inside information about programs and
services with the hope that they would apply and enroll (Flagel, 2012; Lautz et al., 2005). These
visits also provided college admission officers with opportunities to learn about a school or
community’s context which is of critical importance during holistic review (Bastedo et al., 2022).
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Admission officers as agents of higher education institutions are “wittingly or
unwittingly…producer[s] and reproducer[s] of objective meaning” through the execution of their
routine admission duties (Bourdieu & Nice, 2005, p. 79). In a society stratified by race and
socioeconomic status, the interactions between college admission offices and high schools
communicate value and shape the dispositions and actions of prospective students and their
counselors (Bourdieu & Nice, 2005; Holland, 2019). The regular interactions between admission
offices, school counselors, and students at elite high schools for instance communicates that
these students belong in highly selective college and university environments.
The findings in this chapter describe how market and equity logics frame how admission
officers think about recruitment, how they construct their travel schedules, and more importantly
how they justify their actions to themselves and others. In my conversations with admission
officers, it was evident that market logics functioned as “regulatory devices [that] oriented
practice” (Bourdieu & Nice, 2005, p. 21) toward the selection of high schools that had
longstanding histories of enrollment. For many of the admission officers in the sample, the
exclusion of high schools that served high concentrations of Black, Latinx, and low-income
students was not intentional, as the selection of high schools was highly routinized and had
become institutionalized over time. Also routinized over time were broad framings of diversity in
which race was just one of many identities to which admissions should be attuned; yet, even in
this environment, 60% of the sample of admission officers I interviewed expressed perspectives
consistent with what I call equity logics.
For admission officers employing equity logics, excellence and diversity were not
mutually exclusive. They recognized that inequitable admission processes played a role in
reproducing and maintaining the racial and socioeconomic stratification of higher education. For
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example, in a 2020 interview (Public Affairs, 2020), Femi Ogundele UC Berkeley’s Assistant
Vice Chancellor and Director of Undergraduate Admissions, commented that
In some communities, counselors don’t push top students to apply to the best schools,
typically because colleges haven’t engaged them and, therefore, there are
misunderstandings about our institutions that keep students from our applicant pools. I
am always trying to solve the undermatching phenomena…A lot of times, that has to do
with a lack of exposure to those schools. Institutions like ours typically do not visit these
students’ high schools, because a majority of those students do not have perfect SATs and
straight A’s.
In Femi Ogundele’s statement, UC Berkeley as an admissions office was taking personal
accountability for the underrepresentation of Black, Latinx and low-income students. The
participants in the sample for this study who employed equity logics echoed similar sentiments.
They attempted to build travel schedules that allowed them to engage schools and community-
based organizations that served high concentrations of Black, Latinx, and low-income students.
Off-campus recruitment as an admissions practice is value neutral. Whether it is a tool for
equity or exclusion is primarily a function of how it is used. College admission offices know that
a personal connection with an admission staff member is an important factor in the college
application and decision-making process of prospective students (Secore, 2018). Nearly all of the
admission officers I interviewed stated that high school visits were an important vehicle for
building relationships with prospective students and their counselors. For those admission
officers expressing equity logics, scheduling off-campus recruitment visits with community-
based organizations, and high schools that served high concentrations of minoritized groups was
deeply personal. Lamont (2009) argues that “evaluation is a process that is deeply emotional and
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interactional. It is culturally embedded” (p. 8), and this was evident in my conversations with
admission officers who shared insights about how their institutional context and personal
experiences with highly selective college admissions as students shaped their beliefs and values
about off-campus recruitment as a practice.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I hope to have provided a window into the thinking that guides
admissions professionals as they develop and implement plans for off-campus recruitment
activities as part of the admissions process. I discussed common purposes of off-campus
recruiting, the role of institutional context, and market logics as three factors that structure
decisions about the travel schedule. I also presented perspectives on broad diversity framings and
substantive equity logics that motivated some admissions professionals’ decisions. I argued that
market logics function as a set of rules, practices, and narratives that focus admission officers’
attention in ways that reproduce and maintain the racial and socioeconomic stratification of
higher education. Equity logics, as innovations developed by admission officers to manage
conflicting institutional demands, however, challenge the rules, practices, and narratives that are
commonplace in college admissions in ways that seek to empower and enhance the agency of
students from Black, Latinx, and low-income communities. Together, we see structure and
agency operating through these logics.
I found that admission professionals who center equity in their praxis are specific about
the problems they are trying to solve. For these professionals, off-campus recruitment visits are
an organizational practice that can be redefined in ways that are attuned to the structural
inequities present in the highly selective college admissions process. As admission officers in the
sample engaged in redefining the role and purpose of off-campus recruitment activities, they
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often did so in ways that demonstrated that they recognized the role that routine admission
practices played in the racial and socioeconomic stratification of higher education.
Market and equity logics and their corresponding theories, frames, and narratives
function as “external mechanisms of social control that determine how individuals work” (Hallett
et al., 2009, p. 499). How admission professionals take up these logics as they construct their
travel schedules varies and can tell us a great deal about the meaning-making that happens in
college admission offices about equity and market issues. Institutional scholars have long argued
that in order to understand action, one must explore the meanings held by organization members
(Gray et al., 1985). Through an examination of the meaning of diversity in college admissions, I
learned that admission officers were managing competing priorities and that this tension often
led to the development of new modes of thinking about off-campus recruitment. In some cases,
new modes of thinking led admission officers to revise their practice in ways that were more
aligned with their personal values.
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Chapter Six: Conclusion and Implications
Historically, high school visits have been leveraged to both maintain status boundaries
and to expand the enrollment of racially minoritized students. In the 1920s high school visits
were leveraged to maintain and build strong relationships with private boarding schools that
traditionally served as feeder schools for the nation’s most elite colleges and universities
(Karabel, 2005a). In the 1960s and the decades that immediately followed high school visits
were used as a tool to expand the enrollment of racially minoritized groups (Karabel, 2005b). In
the Civil Rights era, college admission offices expanded their outreach to high schools that
served large concentrations of Black, Latinx, and low-income students in order to expand
enrollment of these groups. In the post-Civil Rights era, admission recruitment practices are one
of the ways that higher education institutions make race and socioeconomic status relevant and
meaningful in a higher education ecosystem where opportunity and access are not equally
distributed. Since the 1960s, college admission offices have been engaged in efforts to increase
the enrollment of marginalized groups (Cole, 2020; Karabel, 2005b), including the development
of targeted recruitment programs and the establishment of the assistant/associate director of
multi-cultural admission positions (Cole, 2020; Karabel, 2005b, Stevens & Roksa, 2012;
Stulberg & Chen, 2014). However, race and equity in college admissions have been fraught with
controversy since the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case was decided in 1978.
This historical context demonstrates that the development and subsequent execution of
market or equity-oriented recruitment responsibilities can reproduce or disrupt the racial and
socioeconomic stratification of higher education. Off-campus recruitment is a crucial element of
the college enrollment process for admission offices across the United States. Each year,
institutions of higher education spend approximately $10 billion on their recruitment efforts
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(Selingo, 2020). These expenditures cover admission officer salaries, travel expenses, consulting
firm fees, the purchase of student names, and direct marketing campaigns via mail or social
media. In highly selective college admission offices throughout the country, college admission
professionals develop recruitment plans that are designed to maximize the enrollment of their
“ideal applicants” in the first-year class. For many, the ideal applicant has high SAT scores, can
afford to pay tuition, and comes from an academically rigorous high school (Hoover, 2017;
Karabel, 2005a). These priorities have led many highly selective college admission offices to
develop travel schedules that overwhelming serve White, wealthy students that are also
advantaged in the college admission process that follows recruitment (Gordon, 2013; Salazar et
al., 2021).
B. Alden Thresher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s first admission director,
described the importance of college admission recruitment activities when he stated that the
“forces that lead a given student to apply to a specific college constitute, in the aggregate, a more
far-reaching and effective sorting device than the small amount of selectivity the college is able
to exercise” (Thresher, 2017, p. 96). In Thresher’s statement, we are challenged to consider the
role that high school visits—and off-campus recruitment activities more broadly—may play in
sorting students into higher education institutions: Prior research on the college admissions
process has uncovered the plethora of ways that college recruitment activities influence the
application behavior (Gurantz et al., 2017; Howell et al., 2018). Prospective college student
perceptions of campus fit (Stephenson et al., 2016), affordability (Roderick et al., 2011), and the
likelihood of admission (Mulhern, 2021) often influence whether prospective applicants will add
a college to their college application list, which researchers refer to as a choice set (Cabrera & La
Nasa, 2000). Off-campus college recruitment activities such as high school visits and college
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fairs are critical contact points for prospective applicants who are traditionally underrepresented
in higher education—when those contacts occur. For many Black, Latinx, and low-income
students, off-campus recruitment activities provide important “signals” from higher education
institutions about their college options (Holland, 2019; Hoover, 2019a; Intindola et al., 2017). As
participants in my research have expressed, off-campus recruiting is a means of information
sharing and confidence building, that are crucial to students taking steps to realize their college
aspirations. Therefore, in order to fully understand the complexity of higher education’s racial
and socioeconomic stratification problem (i.e., an aspect of the “sorting” that Thresher
recognized) attention must be paid to the how highly selective college admission offices make
decisions about which high schools they will visit during recruitment season (Domina et al.,
2017).
Informed by the findings from Posselt’s (2015) comparative ethnographic case study of
graduate admissions processes, this study investigated the presence of field-level equity and
market logics in undergraduate admissions, as a way of understanding these decisions. Posselt’s
(2015) introduction of disciplinary logics as shared cultural norms and values that are socially
constructed through common knowledge provided much of the framing for this study. Similarly,
this dissertation, through its investigation of the recruitment and outreach activities of
undergraduate admissions offices, explored how the tension between market and equity logics
shape the priorities, values, and actions of admission officers in highly selective colleges and
universities. In my quest to learn more about how admission officers approached this decision,
this study explored the following:
1. How college admission offices constructed admission officer roles.
2. The ways college admission offices framed and talked about diversity.
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3. How admission officers understood their roles and developed their travel schedules.
More specifically, I was interested in understanding how and why admission offices
constructed off-campus recruitment schedules that prioritized high schools that served high
concentrations of wealthy White students (Gordon, 2013; Salazar et al., 2021). I was especially
interested in investigating this phenomenon because, at face value, an off-campus recruitment
strategy that is focused on students that are overrepresented in highly selective colleges and
universities appears contradictory with the commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion
espoused by many universities (Carnevale & Strohl, 2013; Chetty et al., 2017). The research
design used interview data and an analysis of admission office websites, job descriptions,
LinkedIn profiles, and campus news archives to explore the underlying field-level logics that
guided college admission recruitment practices in highly selective colleges and universities.
By exploring the mindsets of admission officers and offices, this study brings a new
perspective to the literature on college enrollment and recruitment for low-income, Black, and
Latinx students (Blackwell & Pinder, 2014; Cabrera & La Nasa, 2000; Holland, 2014; Hoxby &
Avery, 2013; Perna, 2006). With few exceptions (e.g., Salazar et al., 2021), studies that have
focused on addressing the enrollment behavior of underrepresented students have often
problematized the behaviors of students instead of addressing the systemic behaviors of
admission offices which frame student choices (Hoxby & Avery, 2013; Roderick et al., 2009).
This study contributes to the growing body of literature that focuses on the impact of university
recruitment practices on the college decision process of Black, Latinx, and low-income students
(Carnevale & Strohl, 2013; Iloh, 2018; Salazar et al., 2021).
The tensions I found between market and equity logics in the definition of admissions’
officers’ role, how they enact it, and in the priorities of admissions offices more broadly are
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partially responsible for the racial and socioeconomic stratification of higher education. Yet,
although admissions offices frequently utilized recruitment practices consistent with existing
market logics, individual participants in the study also demonstrated the capacity to innovate and
thus transform institutional practices and behaviors. It is in this tension between standard practice
and potential for equity-minded innovation that most professionals operate. I hope that the
findings from this study will provide new insight to campus leaders who are interested in
creating a more equitable college-recruitment process. In the sections that follow, I briefly
summarize the findings across the chapters, outline implications for practice, and identify
avenues for future research.
Summary of Findings
Here, I will first discuss the study’s findings from organizational, equity, and individual
perspectives, including summaries of the major findings by research question. A major
conclusion that cuts across the organizational and individual perspectives concerns the role of
routines enacted by individuals on behalf of organizations; routines are a space for the
negotiation of tensions between market and equity logics. For example, it is by routine at this
point, reinforced by the dominance of an enrollment management paradigm that aligns with a
market logic, that colleges tend to focus visits on high schools where wealthy and White students
are overrepresented. As Munir (2015) argues, over time in many organizations “hegemony
becomes taken-for-grantedness, and ideology becomes logic” (p. 91); I find that routines are an
important mechanism by which this occurs. In many ways when we talk about logics in college
admissions, what we are discussing is how organizational routines naturalize inequality, diminish
the agency of groups, and decouple commitments to equity from everyday practice (Ray, 2019).
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Organizational Perspective
One research question focused on understanding what organizational routines were
employed by admission officers in their pursuit of university recruitment goals. For the sake of
understanding off-campus recruitment as an administrative process, I conducted discourse
analyses of admission officer job descriptions. And, through interviews with admission officers, I
explored how individual admission officers decided which high schools they would visit during
recruitment season. The results show that the decision of which high school a college or
university will visit is based on a number of factors including, but not limited to, the previous
application or enrollment history of students in the college or peer institutions, average SAT
scores of students sending score reports and the colleges perception of students’ ability to pay
full tuition. These off-campus recruitment activities were one of the mechanisms through which
logics were articulated, performed, and experienced. I also found that when determining whether
a high school is worthy of an off-campus recruitment visit, college and university admission
offices were often constructing and reifying racial and socioeconomic boundaries—boundaries
that were established with the founding of the college admission profession in the 1920s. In this
study, discourses about the ability to pay, likelihood to enroll, or history of sending students,
were often served as rationales for the development of recruitment territories that excluded high
schools that served high concentrations of Black, Latinx, or low-income students.
From an organizational perspective, college admission recruitment routines that make use
of market logics focus the attention of admission officers on high schools with students that have
a history of sending applications, have high SAT scores, or have the ability to pay the cost of
tuition. In my discussions with admission officers in this study, I found that market logics shaped
how admission officers articulated problems their offices were attempting to solve as well as
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their routines for privileging well-resourced high schools in their off-campus recruitment,
specifically. As employees of highly selective college admission offices, many participants in the
sample recognized that they were directly responsible for attracting, admitting, and enrolling a
first-year class that would “keep the lights on,” as one participant noted. From an institutional
perspective, this was evident in the way admission officer job descriptions routinely mentioned
that admission activities must be aligned in ways that meet “institutional goals”. When admission
officers described their institution’s goals, they were often thinking about revenue targets and
selectivity.
My conversations with admission officers allowed unusual insight into large scale
patterns that others have documented: how the rise of academic capitalism and the uncertainty of
student enrollment in higher education has led to the marketization of the college admissions
profession (Hossler & Kalsbeek, 2013; McDonough & Robertson, 2012; Slaughter & Rhoades,
2004). Marketization has prompted enrollment management professionals to adopt recruitment
practices and tools that are similar to those found in traditional consumer markets. Over time, the
institutionalization of market-oriented tools and practices has shaped the beliefs, values, and
organization of the admissions office and the enrollment management professionals within them
(Hossler & Bontrager, 2015; Wilkinson et al., 2007). The institutionalization of market-oriented
recruitment tools, practices, and beliefs over time (i.e., beliefs and practices that privilege certain
student academic and financial qualities) has conditioned admission office staff to naturalize the
idea that the underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and low-income students at highly selective
colleges and universities is a foregone conclusion. Market logics and the discourses associated
with them, as Bonilla-Silva (2018) argues, “explain contemporary racial inequality as the
outcome of nonracial dynamics” (p. 2). Equity as an organizational goal becomes exceptionally
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challenging endeavor for highly selective colleges and universities in a market-based recruitment
paradigm.
Equity Perspectives
However, the college admission offices represented in this study incorporated race and
equity in their off-campus recruitment activities in a number of ways. In my study, I found that
structurally, admission offices (RQ1a) incorporated race and equity by developing targeted
recruitment programs and formal roles which had responsibility for leading race and equity
initiatives in their offices. These dedicated positions were responsible for coordinating outreach
and developing relationships with high schools and community-based organizations that served
historically marginalized groups. In many of the job descriptions, the recruitment of students
from minoritized groups was what can be described as a racial task (Wingfield & Alston, 2014).
Multicultural recruitment was often articulated in ways that made it abundantly clear that the
work performed by individuals in these roles should be focused on upholding the organization’s
image as champions for diversity, even if the routine admission practices performed elsewhere
undermined that goal.
One unanticipated finding was that, rather than centering recruitment of minoritized
students in high schools, admission offices formed relationships with community-based
organizations to increase the enrollment of Black, Latinx, and low-income students. The pursuit
of relationships with community-based organizations was one of the only strategies that was
widely diffused and specifically focused on outreach to communities that were underrepresented
in higher education. When placed in its historical context, the pursuit of relationships with
community-based organizations makes sense. This practice was commonly used by multicultural
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admission officers when their positions proliferated at the conclusion of the civil rights
movement (Cole, 2020; Karabel, 2005a).
Individual Perspectives
At the individual level, I found that the broad definitions of diversity used by college
admission offices made it difficult for admission officers to incorporate equity—or even
equality—into their routine recruitment practices. In Chapter 5, I reported findings that broad
framings of diversity in use in their admission offices make it challenging for them to focus their
recruiting efforts in ways that would address the underrepresentation of Black, Latinx, and low-
income students in highly selective colleges and universities. The institutional centering nature of
diversity discourses facilitated the development of recruitment practices that were focused on
impression management and reaching diversity thresholds set for Black, Latinx, and low-income
students in higher education (Chang et al., 2019; Mayorga-Gallo, 2019). Through my
conversations with admission officers, I realized that how admission offices talked and thought
about equity in admissions had important downstream consequences; these ideas influenced
admission officer values and more importantly shaped the ways they carried out their day-to-day
responsibilities.
Scholars have argued that in many organizations and corners of society, diversity
discourses are “happy talk” which frame diversity in ways that normalize and center whiteness
without ever acknowledging oppression (Bell & Hartmann, 2007). In the analyses I conducted, I
found that admission offices routinely engaged in happy talk and framed diversity in abstract
terms that rarely acknowledged race, racism, or oppression. When asked to describe how
diversity was operationally defined in their offices, nearly all of the admission officers used some
version of happy talk. The challenge with happy talk as an organizational strategy is that it
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diverts attention and resources from continuing forms of racism and the redress of past injustices.
Relatedly, while race was not specifically mentioned by participants in connection with beliefs
about admissibility, likelihood to enroll, or ability to pay we must remember that these issues
have a racialized history (Karabel, 2005a; Synnott, 1979; Thelin, 2011). The proliferation of
ideas about “who is admissible”, “who can afford to pay”, and “who is likely to enroll” is how
admissions offices participate in race-making or the social construction of race (Lewis, 2003).
With respect to the second research question (RQ2), I found that admission officers
responded to the competition between the yield and equity goals of their offices in three main
ways. For approximately 40% of the admission officers in the sample, managing the tension was
relatively straightforward, as their offices provided less oversight of their travel schedules so
they could add as many high schools as they wished to visit, as long as they had the capacity for
the visit on their travel schedule. For these admission professionals, the intense pace and
expectations for visiting feeder schools with histories of enrollment during the travel season
made it very difficult for them to focus their recruitment efforts on developing relationships with
new high schools that might or might not yield additional applicants or enrollees.
For others, the response to this tension was to acquiesce to market logics, which often
constrained their activity where equity was concerned. For the majority of admission officers in
the sample, the lack of individual autonomy combined with rules and norms associated with
market logics did not provide space and opportunity for admission officers to focus their
recruitment efforts on high schools that served high concentrations of Black, Latinx, and low-
income students. Such schools did not have application and enrollment patterns that would
categorize them as feeder schools. A third pattern of responding to the tensions of market and
equity logics was leaning on their office’s expressed commitments to advancing equity. These
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admission officers made use of their office’s equity discourses to provide rationales for adding
additional schools to their travel schedules.
Synthesis
In Figure 2, I present high school visits as one practice in the broader college-admissions
activity system. Admission officers utilize these visits to generate applications and enroll a class
that meets the enrollment targets that were set for them by their supervisors. The approach that
individual admission officers take to build their travel schedules is shaped by their organizational
context and is constrained by the rules and norms established for them by their office. For
example, a state flagship’s admission-recruitment activities might be limited by state laws.
Admission offices may institutionalize state laws (or interpretations of them) via formal policy in
their job descriptions. College-admission recruitment plans enabled admission offices and the
staff within them to focus their activity in ways that ensured that they would accomplish their
goals (Strati, 1998). As admission officers devised their travel schedules, market and equity
logics provided habits for their actions (Gross, 2009). One of the central arguments that I
advance in this dissertation is that the selectivity gap present in higher education can be partially
attributed to tensions in the mindsets of admission officers and offices, which motivate college
recruitment activities that privilege White students from well-resourced high schools and
communities and create secondary systems for recruiting students from historically
underrepresented groups. Reskin (2003) argues that our explanations of inequitable outcomes
should include mechanisms or processes that bind groups’ ascriptive identities (e.g., race, class,
national origin, etc.) to variables of interest. Figure 2 provides a graphical representation of how
the admission theories, frames, narratives, and practices that underpin everyday admissions
activity are institutionalized (Koschmann et al., 1998; Núñez, 2009).
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Figure 2
College Admissions Recruitment Hierarchal Activity Structure
Note. Adapted from “Activity Theory and the utilisation of the activity system according to the
mathematics educational community,” by I. Núñez, 2009, Educate, Special Issue (December
2009), 53, p. 10.
Off-campus recruitment is a mechanism or intervening variable that links group
membership to the college information network and its corresponding opportunity structure. My
study suggests that when admissions professionals were constructing their travel schedules, they
were often engaged in the construction and maintenance of identities. For example, when
assessing characteristics such as student admissibility, likelihood to enroll, or ability to pay,
admission officers were often ascribing students and high school communities to groups and
conferring status and resources upon them based on their association in these groups.
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My research was a response to calls for scholars to explore the role that organizations
play in the maintenance and reproduction of racial and socioeconomic inequality in the modern
era (Acker, 2006; Hall, 2017; Ray, 2019; Small, 2009). This study, through its interrogation of
routine admission recruitment practices, has been focused on bringing the admissions office and
recruitment practices back into the conversation about the racial stratification of higher
education. The strategic targeting of high schools for off-campus recruitment visits provided an
opportunity to observe how admission offices allocate resources, construct boundaries, and
develop relationships with members of society that are the most marginalized. Such how
questions are critically important in shifting the analytical focus from outcomes to organizational
processes that contribute to outcomes. This approach also provided a space for me to explore
issues of structure and agency through an examination of how admission officers interpreted
their role, their organizational context, and their responsibility for advancing equity in higher
education. The theories, frames, and narratives that shape their positions and how they inhabit
those positions are critical to understanding the legitimation of practices that perpetuate
inequality. I follow the use of logics as a means of capturing how theories, frames, and narratives
work together to guide and direct recruitment and admissions practices.
Implications for Improving Admissions Practice and Research
In the sections that follow, I offer recommendations to improve admissions practice and
provide new avenues for research on college admission and recruitment practices. In order for
admission officers to fully understand and address the racial and socioeconomic stratification of
higher education in the present, they must understand that the underrepresentation of Black,
Latinx, and low-income students at selective institutions of higher education is a by-product of
their exclusionary past (Blumer, 1958). Exclusion was a central operating logic of the college
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admission office when it was developed in the 1920’s and has been deeply embedded in the
practices that admissions professionals hold dear today, which mainly focus on maintaining or
improving the financial status or prestige of their institutions. In order to move forward
prioritizing equity, we must grapple with this history and design admission processes that are
designed to address the equity challenges that are facing college admission offices today.
Restructuring and Creating New Roles
One way to confront the exclusionary history of college admissions is to fundamentally
restructure the admission officer position. One process for restructuring the admission officer
role is to lead admission officers in an exercise where they deconstruct and restructure the
admission officer role in ways that they believe will advance equity. The deconstruction of the
admission officer role would require an audit of how professionals allocate time, an analysis of
their core responsibilities, and consideration of the key skills and abilities of ideal applicants.
The process of deconstructing the admission officer role would provide an opportunity for
admission professionals to engage in critical dialogue about how routine tasks and
responsibilities could be leveraged to advance equity. The deconstruction process would also
surface implicit theories, frames, and narratives that undergird routine admissions work.
Surfacing the cognitive frames that are embedded in admissions work is an essential first step in
delegitimizing inequitable admissions practice.
The multicultural admission officer role, for instance, provides an example of one
position in the college admission office that was purposefully restructured. The core
responsibilities, ideal skills, logics of action, and reason d’etre of the admission officer position
was reconstructed to advance equity when multicultural admission officer positions were first
developed in the 1960s (Cole, 2020; Karabel, 2005a) and it proliferated across universities in the
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1980s and 1990s (Berrey, 2015; Thomas, 2020). The history of the multicultural admission
officer position illustrates that admission officer positions can be designed with equity logics at
the center, and it can serve as a blueprint for the redesign of the admission officer position. In
addition to rethinking individual admission officer roles, it will be critically important for
admission offices to think differently about how college admission offices are structured, and
how existing structures advance or do not advance equity.
One approach for rethinking the administrative structure of college admission offices is to
create an equity advocate position on the admission leadership team. The equity advocate role
draws from research in the improvement of organizational decision making (Schwenk & Cosier,
1980) that recognizes that individuals who are assigned to roles that are formally responsible for
challenging group-decision making can lead to better outcomes. Such an individual may have
several types of responsibilities, which could vary depending upon an office’s needs. For
example, in some offices the equity advocate might pay specific attention to how marginalized
groups navigate and experience the college enrollment process. This newly developed equity
advocate position would, perhaps in other offices, be empowered to identify biases present in the
admission process and make recommendations that advance equitable admission recruitment
practices (Liera, 2020). The equity advocate could also lead the admissions leadership team in
disaggregating and analyzing recruitment data, ensuring the recruitment process adheres to
equity-minded search principles, and restructuring the admission officer job description in ways
that advance equity. While the equity advocate role is designed to improve admission decision-
making processes, it does not obviate the need for all admission officers to develop equity-
minded habits of practice (Bensimon & Malcom, 2012).
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Equity-Minded Professional Development
In order to develop equity-minded habits of practice, college admission offices must
ensure that they provide staff with professional development opportunities that are focused on
equity-minded admissions practice. An implication of this study, that is supported by prior
research, is that we can develop the racial and equity consciousness of admissions staff by
educating them about the history of discrimination and exclusion in college admissions. Social
psychologists have conducted studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. In a
series of randomized controlled trials, researchers found that brief interventions that educate
individuals about historical acts of discrimination can lead to greater understandings of the
presence of discrimination in modern society (Bonam et al., 2018; Nelson et al., 2013). The
admission officers in this study who espoused deep commitments to equity had an understanding
of the historical impact of discriminatory practices in college admissions.
Increasing Access to and Transparency of Critical Information
Another approach for reimagining the structure of college admissions is to open access to
the college information network by expanding where interaction occurs. The current model relies
on communications between individual high schools and colleges admission officers. Many
school districts and charter network operators across the country are developing college access
teams who can work collaboratively with college counselors across school sites and geographic
regions in ways that can address the need to manage the “efficiency” tensions raised by
admission officers in this study. In states where there are robust educational data systems (i.e.,
Delaware, Idaho), public colleges and universities can work with state education departments to
identify students that meet the criteria for admission. Expanding the relationship building
practice to local and state education agencies would allow colleges to identify students based on
138
their performance in their local high schools rather than through the use of standardized test
scores, which are known to be biased (Lemann, 2000). While there has been research that has
interrogated the use of the SAT in admission decision making there has been less attention paid
to the role of the SAT in earlier stages of the college admissions process and as the number of
colleges adopting test optional admission policies increases there will be a need to diminish the
use of SAT as a tool for identifying students who will receive college admission recruitment and
marketing materials.
An additional mechanism for improving admissions practice would entail increasing
transparency about the ways in which admissions offices use data in their everyday decision-
making. In an admission system where one’s access to information can influence opportunity
structures, we must consistently question whether information is being shared equitably. In my
conversations with admission officers, it was clear that the data available to college admission
professionals influenced the decisions they made about which students were “desirable” or
“worthy” of recruitment (Duniway, 2012; Engler, 2021). Due to pre-established and long-lasting
relationships with selective colleges and universities, Admission counselors at private schools
often possess insider knowledge about how data is used in college admissions decision-making.
As a result, private school counselors often adjust their counseling practices in ways that will
increase the odds that the students they serve will be admitted. Disclosing the information that is
taken for granted in selective college admission circles can empower counselors who serve
marginalized communities in similar ways. Admission officers, in this study, frequently
mentioned that they utilized high school visits to coach counselors and students on how to
successfully navigate the college admissions process. High school visits are a crucial space for
“information sharing” that can demystify the black box that is selective college admissions for
139
those that have been historically excluded and ensuring that “is done equitably is critically
important for advancing equity.
Additionally, admission offices in their efforts to advance equity in college admissions
should subject the data and algorithms that are in used in decision-making to external auditing.
Contemporary social exclusion and discrimination are often expressed via algorithms that shape
what we pay attention to, how we calculate risks, and ultimately how we make decisions about
the allocation of resources (Benjamin, 2016; Benjamin, 2019). As Frank Pasquale (2015) notes
the “power to include, exclude, and rank is the power to ensure that certain public impressions
become permanent” (p. 14). In college admissions offices, algorithms built by external
consulting firms (e.g., EAB, Ruffalo Noel Levitz, etc.) often work to naturalize the social
exclusion of Black, Latinx, and low-income students by proliferating ideas about students’ ability
to pay or their likelihood to enroll. Organizations like MIT’s Media Lab can work with
admissions offices and their consultants to conduct equity audits of the algorithms being used by
their staff. External auditors in their reviews may be able to determine whether existing
algorithms routinely assign lower scores to students from marginalized communities and
recommend alternative data points that might yield different outcomes.
Enhancing Equity in Day-to-Day Admissions Work
This study holds practical implications to advance equity in college admissions decision
making as well. First, the homophily present in highly selective college admission offices is a
problem that will need to be addressed. In a recent report, NACAC (2022) reported that 81% of
chief admission officers and 71% of admission counselors were White. Data from several studies
on hiring and selection processes in higher education suggest that the racial composition of
committees can affect, both positively and negatively, the application and selection of individuals
140
from underrepresented groups (Bowman & Bastedo, 2018; Kazmi et al., 2022; Posselt, 2016).
While one cannot presume that the presence of people of color in college admission offices will
automatically transform and challenge existing paradigms, practices, or structures, it will most
certainly send a signal to prospective students, families, and admissions staff that an institution is
taking appropriate steps to make space for individuals that have traditionally been excluded from
highly selective colleges and universities. Increasing the levels of diversity among admissions
staff when pursued as part of a larger equity-minded change process will undoubtedly lead
admission offices to develop new and enhanced relationships that may expand the applications
from and enrollment of underrepresented groups.
Additionally, in a system where there are so many threats to equitable processes and
outcomes, I would encourage admission offices to center equity in the recruitment process by
instituting equity checks (Posselt et al., 2020) or pauses (equityXdesign, 2016). Equity checks or
pauses are moments where teams collect data and engage in dialogue about whether the observed
outcomes and the process being utilized reflect their shared commitments to equity. For instance,
an admissions team can institute an equity pause by reviewing disaggregated data to determine
how many high schools that serve high concentrations of Black, Latinx, and low-income students
are being served. Equity checks or pauses will challenge admission officers and their supervisors
to stop, reflect, and determine whether their off-campus recruitment schedules, and other routine
practices, are aligned with the office’s diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. The design of a suite
or schedule of equity checks throughout the recruitment, admission, and financial aid award
cycle might also be a responsibility of the equity advocate, in offices that choose to create this
role.
141
Lastly, linking practice with the policy environment, I would be remiss not to encourage
admissions offices to recognize how their day-to-day responsibilities are reflective of local
incentive structures. There is a formal role for state and federal authorities to influence the
behavior of admission offices by changing the incentive structure. In the 1960s, the Kennedy
administration, through Executive Order 10925, shifted higher education enrollment priorities by
conditioning government funding on progress toward the advancement of racial equity
(Okechukwu, 2019). During this period higher education saw the most rapid expansion of Black,
Latinx, and Asian college students (Karabel, 2005a). State and federal legislators can change the
incentive structure of highly selective institutions by conditioning grant funding and Title IV
funding on the enrollment of underrepresented groups.
Implications for Future Research
The questions raised by this study identify a need for additional research that interrogates
the black box of college admission recruitment practices. To effectively address the racial and
socioeconomic stratification of higher education we must pay attention to the organizational
practices that facilitate the system’s stratification. Toni Morrison (2020) famously noted that
“race magnifies the matter that matters” (p. 133) and for Black, Latinx, and low-income high
school students navigating the college enrollment process race and socioeconomic status
continue to shape the relationships that they are able to form with colleges and universities. Race
and socioeconomic status as ascriptive identities also shape the access to and use of college
knowledge (Holland, 2019; McDonough, 1997). In the sections below, I discuss potential areas
for future research given the important role that ascriptive identities play in determining access to
college information networks (Dynarski et al., 2018; George-Jackson & Gast, 2014; Hoxby &
Avery, 2013; Roderick et al., 2011).
142
The findings in this study highlight the need for additional research that explores
interactions between educational organizations. Future research that explores interactions
between schools, community-based organizations, and highly selective colleges and universities
can tell us a great deal about the social positioning of these organizations in our highly stratified
higher education ecosystem. Meso-level interactional studies can help illustrate how racism and
social exclusion have been rearticulated and institutionalized through spatialized college
admission recruitment practices.
A natural progression of this work would be a national study that investigates the off-
campus recruitment practices of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs),
Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), or Regional
Comprehensive Universities. These universities have been successful in enrolling Black, Latinx,
and low-income students and could be ideal sites for case studies about successful approaches for
developing relationships with high schools that serve high concentrations of Black, Latinx, or
low-income students. Through dialogue with enrollment management professionals employed at
these institution types, we may learn more about how racialized institutional identities shape how
market and equity logics are inhabited by admission officers.
The role of community-based organizations as college pathway brokers is an intriguing
topic that could be usefully explored in future research. In both participant interviews and in
admission officer job descriptions for this research, community-based organizations were
described as a strategy for developing relationships with Black, Latinx, and low-income students.
Researchers may wish to examine the history of the use of community-based organizations in
college admissions and detail how community-based organizations are selected when developing
off-campus recruitment schedules. Additionally, when studying the role of community-based
143
organizations in selective college admissions processes, researchers should explore the
percentage and types of students these organizations serve, disaggregating them by
race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other identities of interest. Social network analyses of
who is being served by college access community-based organizations is critically important
because the literature on school partnerships has identified that there are significant inequities in
relationships with community-based organizations between schools (Bridwell-Mitchell, 2019).
Finally, social network analyses of the relationships between colleges and high schools
that serve high concentrations of wealthy students of color could provide additional insight about
the role that race and socioeconomic status play, individually and together, in the formation of
college information networks. Race as a social construct is comprised of multiple elements (Sen
& Wasow, 2016); by intentionally focusing on the relationships between highly selective colleges
and high schools that serve high concentrations of wealthy students of color, researchers will be
better able to tease out how whiteness functions as a credential in college admission processes
(Small, 2009).
Conclusion
Off-campus recruitment visits, as a ritual in the college enrollment process, have the
potential to reinforce stratification in college application and enrollment. These visits—and the
broader work of admissions offices—help shape the college-going habitus of students that attend
high schools that serve high concentrations of Black, Latinx, or low-income students (Harper,
2015; McDonough, 1997). The interactions students from minoritized groups have with college
admission offices influence many of the subsequent decisions they make in the college
enrollment process (Andrews et al., 2020; Holland, 2019; Howell et al., 2021; Smith et al.,
2022). Research on targeted recruitment programs at the University of Texas at Austin (Andrews
144
et al., 2020), for example, has shown that college admission recruitment activities can shift the
application and enrollment behaviors of students.
Richard Whiteside, former Dean of Admissions at Tulane, stated that “colleges are a
business and admissions is its chief revenue source” (Selingo, 2020, p. 40). The belief that
colleges are a business is central, enduring, and distinctive in college admission circles. It is also
the linchpin of market logics (Whetten, 2006). When colleges describe themselves as a business
or as business-like, and when they identify college admission offices as their lead revenue
generators, what does that mean for equity? Racial capitalism theories would argue that
businesses and the markets that they are a part of accumulate capital by enshrining inequality
(McMillan Cottom, 2020; Melamed, 2015). The differential treatment of individuals who can
provide capital during the college recruitment process should come as no surprise if you take
Dean Whiteside’s statement at face value.
In many ways, the story of the modern college admissions office could be described as
the management of the tension between market and equity logics. In this study, market and
equity logics were not just abstract, ideological superstructures, they were the glue that held
operational processes and people together. Through their enactment, logics provided direction
and purpose for routine admission activities. Institutional logics are also tools that admission
offices and the staff within them utilize for external and internal legitimacy. Universities
negotiate the tension and contradictions between them in different ways, but it is clear that
offices enact equity logics in two, common ways—by creating professional roles dedicated
specifically to multicultural recruitment and focusing on community-based organizations as a
means of reaching racially minoritized students. Admission officers, on the other hand, manage
the contradictions through their enactment of their roles; those whom I interviewed who
145
expressed equity logics recognized that the standard information-sharing function of college
admissions could be finessed into relationship-building with and confidence-building with
prospective applicants from schools that might otherwise be overlooked. There is a long way to
go in creating real space for equity logics as a force for recruitment and admissions activity that
has the same influence as market logics do, but I hope to have highlighted some otherwise under
acknowledged efforts here.
My intention in writing this dissertation was to peek inside the black box of college
admissions and provide an opportunity for readers to join me in discovering the role that race and
socioeconomic status play in shaping how colleges form relationships with high schools that
serve high concentrations of Black, Latinx, and low-income students. In this journey, I
discovered that admission offices and the enrollment management professionals within them
were—year to year and day to day—constantly managing the competing tensions that have
plagued college admission offices since their inception. The enrollment management
professionals interviewed in this study often described the tension between diversity as discourse
and enrollment management as a practice. These tensions could be seen structurally in the
discourses within admission officer job descriptions and were also experienced by admission
officers in the execution of their duties.
146
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180
Appendix A: Interview Protocol
Good afternoon. My name is Steve Desir and I am a doctoral student at the University of
Southern California. Thank you for agreeing to participate in this study. The purpose of this
interview is to gather your perceptions of various university admission recruitment practices. I
would like you to know that you may decline to answer any question or may end the interview at
any time.
If it is okay with you, I will be tape-recording our conversation. The purpose of this is so
that I can get all of the details of the conversation, but at the same time be attentive to the
conversation that I am having with you. I assure you that all of your responses will remain
confidential. I will be compiling all of the comments into a research study which will contain
participant comments without any reference to individuals or their institutions. Do you have any
questions before we get started?
● To start, could you tell me a little about how you got into college admissions.
○ Could you share some information about how you came to be an admissions
officer at your current institution?
○ probe for critical experiences in undergrad (i.e., tour guide), grad school
(assistantship), and professional work experiences
● Why do you do this work?
○ What are some of the challenges associated with this work?
● Can you tell me a little about the onboarding/training you received for your current
role?
○ What have you considered to be the most valuable training experiences
(formal/informal) you’ve had to date? In the past year?
181
● From your perspective what is the role/purpose of high school visits?
○ In your perspective how has this changed over time given technological
advances that allow you to communicate directly with students?
○ What goals/expectations does your office have around travel?
● Please imagine that you are in your office and have received a high school visit
request from the following three high schools. You only have time to add one of the
high schools to your schedule.
○ Could you verbally walk me through what information you considered
important and why? Can you highlight and rank these areas 1–3 etc.?
○ Are there factors that you think may be very important to others that aren’t so
important to you? Vice versa?
○ How did this information lead you to choose the high school that you would
visit?
○ There are many factors to weigh in making the decision about where to visit.
Are there any non-negotiables?
○ What rationale might you provide to your supervisor about why you selected a
particular school.
○ What are some of the trade-offs you have to make when choosing where to
focus your travel efforts?
● Thinking about the last three high schools you visited can you describe the schools
and what the experience was like?
○ Probe for characteristics of the school (public or private).
○ How did you end up deciding to go to this high school?
182
○ What were the interactions like with the counselors/students?
■ What type of information did you share with counselors/students?
○ What was the initial follow-up when you returned to the office from your
travel?
○ What does a successful visit look like?
● If you had the opportunity to design any changes to the current travel schedule in
your office, what do you think you might propose?
○ What if anything would prevent you from instituting the change you just
described?
Now that we have talked about the process of selecting which high schools you visit during
recruitment season, I am curious about how your office thinks about the role of diversity in the
college recruitment process.
● What conversations have you had with colleagues about issues of diversity in college
admissions?
○ How frequently does your office engage in these conversations?
○ When/where do these conversations take place (training, staff meetings, etc.)
○ Who participates in/facilitates these conversations? (i.e., does leadership
participate)
● How is diversity conceptualized in your work at your present institution?
○ How is it factored into considerations for how you do your work? The work of
the larger office?
○ How is this conceptualization similar to/different from other offices where
you have worked in the past?
183
○ Are there any office/admissions professional that you think does this very
well?
○ What goals/targets are set in this area?
○ What does success look like?
● While many campuses across the country have become more diverse, enrollment
patterns in highly selective college campuses have remained relatively the same. Do
you have any thoughts about this?
○ From your perspective why is this the case?
● How does your office assess the effectiveness of the travel strategy?
○ What role does travel play in your evaluation?
● Is there anything else you would like to add?
184
Appendix B: Admission Office Website Review Protocol
This resource was adapted from the Center for Urban Education syllabus review protocol and
revised to ensure the analytical questions were appropriate for college admission websites.
● How does the website talk about off-campus recruitment?
○ What targeted recruitment programs does the office run for students or
counselors?
● Who is assigned to what admissions territory?
● Does the website utilize language that conveys that equity is important/prioritized?
● Does the website clearly state/describe equity goals or interest and expectations for
how this might be accomplished?
● Does the website provide prospective students & staff with information about
admission office equity goals and expectations?
● How frequently does the website mention issues of race/socioeconomic status?
○ How are race and socioeconomic status described?
● Does the website have images of Black, Latinx students?
○ What are the students doing?
○ How many images are used in total.
○ How does this compare with the total number of images?
● How diverse is the staff?
● Overall, does the website convey the message that equity is a priority and that all
students/staff are welcome?
185
Appendix C: Participant Information Sheet
University of Southern California
Rossier School of Education
INFORMATION/FACTS SHEET FOR EXEMPT NON-MEDICAL RESEARCH
Admission Recruitment Processes at Highly Selective Colleges and Universities
You are invited to participate in a research study. Research studies include only people who
voluntarily choose to take part. This document explains information about this study. You should
ask questions about anything that is unclear to you.
PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
This research study aims to understand the high school recruitment practices of admission
officers at highly selective colleges and universities. As an admission officer at a highly selective
college or university, your insights about recruitment practices will provide valuable perspective
and insight about university enrollment priorities.
PARTICIPANT INVOLVEMENT
If you agree to take part in this study, you will be asked to participate in a 60-minute audio-taped
Zoom interview. You do not have to answer any questions you don’t want to; if you don’t want to
be recorded, handwritten notes will be taken.
CONFIDENTIALITY
The members of the research team and the University of Southern California Institutional
Review Board (IRB) may access the data. The IRB reviews and monitors research studies to
protect the rights and welfare of research subjects. Any identifiable information obtained in
connection with this study will remain confidential. Your responses will be coded with a false
name (pseudonym) and maintained separately.
INVESTIGATOR CONTACT INFORMATION
Principal Investigator Steve Desir via email at sdesir@usc.edu or phone at (213) 718-0081.
IRB CONTACT INFORMATION
University of Southern California Institutional Review Board, 1640 Marengo Street, Suite 700,
Los Angeles, CA 90033-9269. Phone (323) 442-0114 or email irb@usc.edu.
186
Appendix D: Recruitment Email
Dear [participant name],
My name is Steve Desir and I am a doctoral student from the Rossier School of
Education at the University of Southern California. I am writing to invite you as an admissions
officer at {Insert Name of Institution Here} to participate in a research study about college
admission and recruitment practices. You are receiving this email because you are an admissions
officer at {Insert Name of Institution Here}. Your email address was obtained from the National
Association of College Admissions (NACAC) membership directory.
As an admissions officer at (Name of Institution), I believe that you would have valuable
insight about admission recruitment practices, and especially what makes them challenging at
highly selective colleges and universities. If you take part in this study, you will complete a 5-
minute online survey and a 75-minute Zoom interview. Your answers in the survey and interview
will be completely anonymous; they will not be linked to you, nor will any individual participant
be identifiable.
If you are unable to formally participate in the study by being interviewed, there may be
other ways that you can support this study still participate. If you have any questions or concerns
about participating in the study or would like to discuss before you commit, please do not
hesitate to email me at sdesir@usc.edu or call me at 213-718-0081. Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Steve Desir
Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Off-campus recruitment is a crucial element of the college enrollment process for admission offices across the United States. In highly selective college admission offices throughout the country, college admission professionals develop recruitment plans that are designed to maximize the enrollment of their “ideal applicants” in the first-year class. There has been relatively little empirical research exploring how highly selective college admission offices make decisions about which high schools they will visit during recruitment season. In my quest to learn more about how admission officers approached this decision-making process, this study was designed to explore: how college admission offices constructed admission officer roles, the ways college admission offices framed and talked about diversity, and how admission officers understood their roles and developed their travel schedules. Guided by the theory of social mechanisms, institutional logics, and the theory of racialized organizations, I discovered that admission offices and the enrollment management professionals within them were—year to year and day to day—constantly managing the tension between market and equity logics. These tensions could be seen structurally in the discourses within admission officer job descriptions and were also experienced by admission officers in the execution of their duties. In many ways when we talk about logics in college admissions, what we are discussing is how organizational routines naturalize inequality, diminish the agency of groups, and decouple commitments to equity from everyday practice.
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Keyholding or gatekeeping: managing the contradictions between market pressures and equity imperatives in the modern racialized college admissions office
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Rossier School of Education
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Educational Leadership
Degree Conferral Date
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Publication Date
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