Selective Liberal Arts Colleges: Higher Quality as Well as Higher Prestige?.

Selectivity in undergraduate admissions is one of the most common and well-known practices of colleges and universities, salient because it is widely regarded as an indicator of institutional quality. This regard emanates from the folklore of higher education, which holds that institutions with more selective admissions have higher academic standards and thus higher quality academic programs than do institutions with less selective admissions [6]. In this context, higher quality, at least in part, means more rigorous and more demanding academic programs. Such folklore is not without some empirical support; selectivity is highly correlated with other characteristics of institutional quality, such as faculty salaries, endowment per student, and educational and general expenditures per student [6]. Thus, the selectivity of undergraduate admissions appears to be a good measure of the perceived academic quality of a college or university [6, 7, 15]. Using admissions selectivity as an indicator of quality raises a fundamental question: how does attending a highly selective college or university, rather than a less selective one, affect students? A common assumption from the folklore of higher education is that students' intellectual development and achievement at highly selective institu-