ArticleScience advances2021
Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores: Evidence from 60,000 undergraduate applications.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- A prosocial value intervention in gateway STEM courses.Journal of personality and social psychology · 2023Trial
- Identifying Substance Use and High-Risk Sexual Behavior Among Sexual and Gender Minority Youth by Using Mobile Phone Data: Development and Validation Study.Online journal of public health informatics · 2025Article
- Large language models predict cognition and education close to or better than genomics or expert assessment.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Artificial Intelligence Meets Holistic Review: Promises and Pitfalls of Automating the Medical Education Admissions Process.Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges · 2025Article
- The InterModel Vigorish (IMV) as a flexible and portable approach for quantifying predictive accuracy with binary outcomes.PloS one · 2025Article
- Income and campus application disparities among European and non-European heritage Hispanic undergraduate applicants.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- The topography of thought.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Who benefits from elite colleges' decreased reliance on high-stakes standardized tests? Evidence from a quasi-field experiment.Research in social stratification and mobility · 2024Article
- Dear admission committee…: Which moves in application essays predict student master grades?PloS one · 2024Article
- Using artificial intelligence to assess personal qualities in college admissions.Science advances · 2023Article
- Goal language is associated with attrition and weight loss on a digital program: Observational study.PLOS digital health · 2022Article
- Linguistic, cultural, and narrative capital: computational and human readings of transfer admissions essays.Journal of computational social science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There is substantial evidence of the relationship between household income and achievement on the standardized tests often required for college admissions, yet little comparable inquiry considers the essays typically required of applicants to selective U.S. colleges and universities. We used a corpus of 240,000 admission essays submitted by 60,000 applicants to the University of California in November 2016 to measure relationships between the content of admission essays, self-reported household income, and SAT scores. We quantified essay content using correlated topic modeling and essay style using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. We found that essay content and style had stronger correlations to self-reported household income than did SAT scores and that essays explained much of the variance in SAT scores. This analysis shows that essays encode similar information as the SAT and suggests that college admission protocols should attend to how social class is encoded in non-numerical components of applications.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.