Giving Compass' Take:

• Charlotte West explains how some states have increased their college-bound population with a direct college admission policy that accepts students without an application process.

• What are the effects of such a policy on in-state students' motivation through high school? How does this impact students of lower socioeconomic status? Are you prepared to support similar policies across the United States?

• Learn more about the preparation for and barriers against college admissions.


Preemptively admitting Idaho students was the idea of Chuck Staben, former president of the University of Idaho, who filled out the university’s undergraduate application one day to see what the experience was like.

“It was slow, clunky and duplicative,” Staben said. “The application was awful. Why do we make it so hard for students to apply?”

The experience prompted him to advocate for a statewide reform of admission to Idaho’s eight public colleges and universities. That would be easier in Idaho than in many other states, since it has a single board of education overseeing K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities, meaning it could track its students through the entire system.

If their grades and test scores meet certain cutoffs, Idaho students are now automatically admitted to its public colleges and universities. They get a letter that directs them to a simple form, common to all eight institutions, on which they fill out basic personal information to claim their spot at a specific school.

Officials hope the strategy will encourage more students to pursue higher education in a state that in 2016 was dead last in the proportion of its high school graduates who went directly on to college: 44 percent, compared to the national average of 70 percent.

Direct admission isn’t just meant to make the application process simpler, said Staben, but is “a piece of a much larger effort to encourage college-going, and to change the psychology of college-going, particularly among lower-income, first-generation [and other] populations less likely to attend college.”

Read the full article about the impact of direct college admission policies by Charlotte West at The Hechinger Report.