Future Admissions Tools and Models Initiative
About the Initiative
The Future Admissions Tools and Models Initiative was developed as a partnership with member institutions where practitioners from a wide range of colleges and universities, along with expert researchers, collaborated to identify, extend, and scale innovative practices through research-based frameworks and tools.
The initiative’s objectives were to:
- Explore, document, and share recent trends and emerging needs in how colleges admit students.
- Identify and develop new sources of information and practical tools.
- Promote a systematic, research-based approach to admission practice that will help colleges meet their goals in an effective, efficient, and transparent manner.
Archive of Research Projects
In the first phase of the Future Admissions Tools and Models Initiative, College Board partnered with practitioners and researchers on four applied research projects designed to address the following critical needs:
- Improving efficiencies in admissions
- Assessing academic achievement and readiness
- Incorporating nonacademic factors in evaluation
- Understanding environmental context
The work of the initiative focused on the last of these needs and resulted in the development of Landscape™—a tool designed for admissions professionals to understand student achievement in context—as well as the three additional projects archived in the Resources section below.
Current Research
College Board remains committed to helping institutions address their critical needs through research and empirically driven solutions. The work of the initiative is being carried forward in other parts of the organization, with increasing focus on helping institutions assess academic readiness in a post-pandemic, test-optional environment.
For example, the Admissions Research Consortium (ARC) is a multiyear, collaborative research initiative with the goal of helping colleges understand how the impacts of the pandemic are shaping their incoming classes, and how these impacts might continue to affect college performance outcomes in the future.