Higher education admissions officers are faced with the monumental task of evaluating thousands of applications, with the expectation that their selections will reflect the institution’s standards, grow diversity, and lead to high enrollment rates.
In order to ensure fairness, promote diversity, and foster an inclusive student body, universities are looking beyond traditional application criteria like standardized test scores in an effort to more thoroughly evaluate each applicant’s strengths, weaknesses, and potential for success in a given cohort or program.
The ultimate goal of this holistic review approach is to consider the “whole” applicant, including a student’s experiences, attributes, academic metrics, and the value they would contribute to learning, practice, and teaching.
But holistic applicant review takes time, and the longer it takes to do this, the more likely it is that the most qualified applicants will receive – and even accept – enrollment offers from other institutions.
Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI) is helping admissions teams manage the numbers game of applications and admissions to better support a holistic applicant review process and more inclusive environment.
AI Can Save Time & Improve Equity in Admissions
Leveraging cognitive technologies like AI in the admission process generates significant efficiencies, including speeding up things like admissions decisions, visa processing in the case of international students, student housing selection, and course registration.
In 2021, the American Association of College of Osteopathic Medicine’s (AACOM) Holistic Admissions Review Program (HARP) asked if AI algorithms, as trained by admissions teams, could be used to identify strong candidates for interview and predict enrollment based on their essay responses to promote more efficient holistic admissions processes.
The algorithms would speed up application review by reducing the burden of faculty/human study and minimizing any unintended prejudicial biases.
Phase I of the study showed that the algorithm correctly predicted a medical school admissions decision to invite-to-interview about 86% of the time (and over 90% in a few cases), albeit for a few medical schools.
“The goal of holistic admissions is to look at the strengths and attributes about applicants that go beyond the traditional admissions criteria, like test scores and GPA,” explains Will Rose, Chief Technology Officer at Student Select AI. “AI provides an opportunity to gain those insights consistently, reliably, and without bias across all applicants.”
College leaders have learned that AI can address some of their largest and most persistent challenges, such as increasing enrollment, improving student retention, and allocating financial aid.
With AI taking over the more tedious data-driven tasks, human evaluators can focus their time on a more thorough holistic review of potential candidates.
"You have thousands of applicants submitting personal statements, responses to essay questions, or maybe interview questions, resumes, letters of recommendation, transcripts. Processing all of these as a human is a cumbersome task,” Emily Campion, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Management & Entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa, said in a recent interview with Talent Select AI, parent company of Student Select AI.
“If we can offload some of that and use natural language processing to extract information, this offers us an opportunity to combine these with the already quantified data,” Campion concluded, dramatically speeding up the applicant review and evaluation process – while also making it fairer and more holistic.
AI Can Reduce Conscious & Unconscious Bias in Admissions
AI can be extremely effective at removing human bias from the admissions process by eliminating the possibility of human-influenced discrimination, so that every applicant receives the exact same consideration.
Opportunities for AI to reduce or even eliminate human bias to create a more holistic admissions process are everywhere.
AI algorithms can be trained to find high schools in marginalized communities that a university has yet to reach out to historically, so the institution can expand recruitment from specific underrepresented backgrounds.
AI can also help eliminate situations where an admissions officer might know an applicant, automatically flagging a personal connection between two parties. From there, a human review of the relationship could be undertaken by admissions officers.
In 2016, Dr. Tim Renick looked into AI technology with chatbots for accepted students at Georgia State University (GSU) to ask basic enrollment questions. Like many institutions, many accepted students at GSU missed key steps to enroll for college on time before the start of the fall semester.
“We found that the students who were being weeded out or eliminated by the summer months were disproportionately from underserved backgrounds, mostly non-White and first-generation students,” Renick stated. “So, when we talk about equity gaps at the college level, those gaps begin even before the first day of college.”
AI is also being used in applicant assessment, to measure personality traits and competencies like leadership, analytical thinking, grit, and more provide a truly holistic applicant review.
“We analyze admissions essays and interviews to provide additional insights that admissions selectors didn’t have access to before,” says Student Select AI Chief Technology Officer Will Rose. “This includes skills, competencies, and personality traits that have proven to predict future academic and professional success, equipping admissions selectors with better information to make holistic admissions decisions.”
Using AI to create a holistic admissions process not only helps foster diversity and inclusion, it can also help identify candidates with high potential for success who might otherwise be overlooked using traditional assessment criteria.
And because AI can be validated to ensure absence of bias or adverse impact, university admissions teams can be confident that their admissions process is fair, equitable, and truly holistic.
Is your admissions program ready to move away from traditional success metrics to measure what really matters?
Schedule a live demo today to see first-hand how Student Select AI reduces time-to-decision while providing a holistic, unbiased view of each candidate and ultimately driving better admissions decisions, enrollment rates, and student outcomes.
