Merit-Based and Need-Based College Admissions

Institutional Diversity as a Backdrop for Variant Admission Standards

The landscape of college and university admission is competitive. The reasons are many, but the institutional diversity of higher education in the United States is a good place to trace the origins of some of this competition.

The United States has more than 4,000 colleges and universities; no two of these higher education institutions are perfectly alike. Higher education in the United States is composed of public and private institutions. Some are 4-year schools whose primary mission is to offer bachelor's degrees in the liberal arts and humanities, while others offer master's and doctoral degrees in a variety of fields. Some institutions are 2-year (or community) colleges that offer associate's degrees and often training in a wide array of technical fields. Other institutions are research oriented, whose faculty members pursue cutting-edge scholarship. Still others are teaching oriented and focused largely on the provision of course-based experiences for students. Some institutions offer programs of study in law, medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, public affairs, veterinary science, business, government, and a variety of other professional fields. Others have only a small number of fields or disciplines from which students can choose. Some have historically rooted service missions, providing education to African American or Native American students, for example. And while some institutions draw students from within only a small regional radius, the majority of institutions enroll students from virtually every nation in the world. Some institutions are small, with only a few hundred students, whereas others are massive multicampus institutions with tens of thousands of students. Some institutions are older than the United States itself. Others have been incorporated only within the last decade. A number of institutions are religious in nature or have a religious affiliation. Some have a vast array of activities for students, while others are very focused on a set of academic objectives with little, or no, extracurricular options for students. Some are located in large metropolitan cities within which the college or university campus blends with commercial activity that surrounds it, while others are distinct campuses with a distinct border, separating the campus from the town or city within which it resides. And, last, although the majority are nonprofit institutions, a growing number of for-profit institutions can now be found that deliver educational opportunity using a variety of teaching modalities (including [Page 1467]online courses), and that are manifestly oriented toward educating students who otherwise do not feel well served by traditional “bricks-and-mortar” institutions.

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