What do counselors think about test-optional admission?

Last week, we conducted a--well, not a survey, exactly--of high school and independent counselors, asking them what they thought about test-optional and test-free admission policies. This is more a testing of the waters of those interested enough and motivated enough to respond.

So, before the fans of tests (who can do their own testing of the water at any time, of course), point this out, file this under "interesting, but not definitive." It might drive discussions, but it won't make a decision for us. And it shouldn't for you, either.

We received about 440 responses, mostly responding to an email we sent to high school counselors across the country. Those responses came from all over, including some from schools that had probably never sent an applicant, let alone an enrolling student to OSU; but we can't be sure because the survey was anonymous. But we received almost as many responses from Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey as we did from Oregon, interestingly enough.

Here are the high level results. The first view (using the tabs across the top) shows the role and location of the respondents. The second shows responses to the survey questions, filtering out those who didn't have an opinion one way or the other. On that view, you can filter by professional role, and choose either the questions about test-optional or test-free admission policies.

And finally, I asked counselors what they'd do if they were in charge at OSU. Those results are on the final tab, filterable by role and/or location.

What do you think? What do you notice? Is it the big thing I noticed? Drop me an email or post a comment below.

Comments

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher). Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held. Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here. It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red. It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...

First-year student (freshman) migration, 2022

A new approach to freshman migration, which is always a popular post on Higher Ed Data Stories. If you're a regular reader, you can go right to the visualization and start interacting with it. And I can't stress enough: You need to use the controls and click away to get the most from these visualizations. If you're new, this post focuses on one of the most interesting data elements in IPEDS: The geographic origins of first-year (freshman) students over time. My data set includes institutions in the 50 states and DC. It includes four-year public and four-year, private not-for-profits that participate in Title IV programs; and it includes traditional institutions using the Carnegie classification (Doctoral, Masters, Baccalaureate, and Special Focus Schools in business, engineering, and art/design. Data from other institutions is noisy and often unreliable, or (in the case of colleges in Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and other territories, often shows close to 100% of enro...

Changes in Educational Attainment, 1940 to 2018

Note: A few people have pointed out that some data on this appears to be slightly askew, even though the story is mostly unchanged. So don't cite it. Don't look at the viz yet. Wait until I tell you. This is an update to a post I did about five years ago , showing the growth in educational attainment in the US over time. I thought then, and I still think, it's among the most jaw-dropping visualizations I've done, not, of course, for the visualization skills, but for the story it tells, and perhaps, the future it holds for us. This is from Table A-1 on this page of the Census Bureau. First, before you dive into it, take a guess about the percentage of adults in the US, aged 35-54 with a bachelor's degree or higher. Got a guess? If you have a college degree, you probably said something like fifty or sixty percent, based on my sampling of twenty people or so. If you didn't, your guess is probably much lower, usually ten or fifteen percent. T...

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog