Direct admissions (DA) programs—where colleges proactively (and preemptively) admit high school students to their institutions without the need to apply—are growing across the country. From an institutional point of view, DA serves as a buzzy recruiting tool, and it is not surprising that such programs are burgeoning in a time of reduced applications and enrollment. DA is also commonly touted as a benefit to students—especially those who would be first-generation college-goers, those lacking the “social capital” needed to navigate a complex college search, and those for whom fees or administrative requirements could be an insurmountable barrier. Does direct admission boost the likelihood that students will actually take the shortcut, accept an unsolicited admission offer, and enroll in that college? A new working paper aims to test the efficacy of DA from the student perspective.
Rather than investigating existing DA efforts, researchers Taylor Odle and Jennifer Delaney recruited six universities to participate in a new program of their own devising. The four-year schools are all anonymous but include both public and private non-profit institutions; capture a range of institutional types; and include two historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and two Hispanic-serving institutions. They are located in four states in the southern and mid-Atlantic regions. All are moderately-selective to open-access institutions (60–90 percent acceptance rate across them) and serve considerable numbers of Pell-eligible students (30–80 percent of all undergraduate students, depending on the school). Average annual tuition ranges from $13,000 to $27,000. Their six-year bachelor’s degree graduation rates range from 40-70 percent. The smallest school has an undergraduate population of less than 1,000; the largest has nearly 27,000.
Participating institutions were allowed to choose a grade point average (GPA) threshold for high school students who would receive a direct admission offer (the ranges selected by the institutions varied from a 2.50 to 3.30 on a standard 4.00 scale) and how many direct admissions they would be willing to provide (these ranged from 2,000 students at one institution to an effectively unlimited number at another). No other criteria were placed on students’ admissions eligibility. All students receiving DA also received tailored information about the college, including majors available and financial aid options, a simplified form to confirm acceptance, and an automatic waiver of any fees associated with admission or enrollment.
The universe of potential college recruits came from users of the Common App online service in each of the four states. (While many DA programs are homegrown and community-centric, Common App is leading the way in expanding DA to a wider swath of states and students.) To be included in the available DA population for this experiment, students had to be high school seniors; have reported their GPA, zip code, and e-mail; have opted-in to receive communications from the Common App; and not be participating in any other Common App experiments or interventions. One third of all Common App users are first-generation college-goers, and 43 percent are from racial and ethnic minority groups. Thus these populations were widely-represented in the researchers’ samples. However, they were required to dig deeper to make sure that students from low-income backgrounds were properly represented, as the average Common App user does not fit that demographic. They ultimately identified 35,473 eligible students across the six institutions and four states, with 17,704 randomly assigned to receive treatment (a direct admission to one of the participating colleges) and the rest randomly assigned to control.
Official college acceptance letters were sent to treatment group students (and their parents or guardians if that information was available) in January of the treatment year, along with the aforementioned school information, FAQ links, and instructions on simplified next steps. Every effort was made to let officials in students’ high schools know about the authenticity of these offers to forestall concerns over a scam. Control group students received no special communication related to this experiment and pursued their application and enrollment processes (or not, as the case may be) in an organic manner. Odle and Delaney observed students’ actions through May.
On average, receiving a DA offer increased the likelihood a student applied to any college by 2.7 percentage points (or 12 percent) and by 2.8 percentage points that they applied specifically to the college that sent the DA. To put it in raw numbers: 308 control students applied to one of the researchers’ partner institutions following the distribution of DA offers (completing a full, formal, and detailed application on their own steam), compared to 829 treatment students (clicking a single button to accept the DA offer and later filling out a pared-down application document). Individual colleges saw increased likelihood of application ranging from 1.1 percent to 6.1 percent. Larger impacts on applications were seen for Black, Hispanic, and multi-racial students, as well as first-generation and low-income students who received DA offers, both to DA-offering institutions and to any college.
However—and this should be the headline—likelihood of enrollment in college (as opposed to mere application) was unchanged between treatment and control group students no matter how the data were sliced.
The null impact on enrollment underlines an important point: Attending college is a human-centric process with a lot of moving parts, not a video game that can be “cheated” with a shortcut. Any institution that is serious about boosting enrollment overall or in terms of specific subsets of students can’t stop at the equivalent of a Konami Code that jumps over admissions hoops and calls it a day. They must put in the work to meaningfully remove administrative, informational, economic, and college-going cultural barriers from the entire postsecondary experience, not just admissions. Clearly, that takes more than “click here to claim your place in college.”
SOURCE: Taylor K. Odle and Jennifer A. Delaney, “Experimental Evidence on ‘Direct Admissions’ from Four States: Impacts on College Application and Enrollment,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (March 2025).
