4.4 Admissions

The following sets of data come from the Office of Admissions. As of July 2019 there has been a change in leadership with the Office of Admissions and the Office of Student Financial Aid reporting to a single Vice President of Enrollment Management. Caution should be taken going forward with these data and the process by which these data are combined given this shift. Regardless, data from Admissions is collected shortly after the first day of class in the Fall semester. Theses data are only for those students for the first-time, full-time entering cohort.

4.4.1 Admitted Students

This data set contains all first-time, full-time students who were enrolled in the Fall cohort of the given year (e.g. 201880 contains those first-time, full-time students who enrolled in August 2018). Legacy status is also identified in this file. Legacy status indicated that an immediate family member attended Wake Forest University (parent, sibling, grandparent, aunt, and/or uncle). Additionally, this file captures the demographics, high school information, and interview information for the students. Admission type is also captured which refers to if a student applied early admission, international admission, or regular admission.7 This is the first major file in the combination program for the LSDS.

Admitted Students ETL
param response
Description Admission
Contact Tamara Blocker
Contact Office Admissions
Input File Type Excel File
Method of Retrieval File sent on request
Frequency of Update Each Fall
Record Type student
ETL File Name Building FR cohort file_4_admissions.sas
Output Data Set Name XADMISSIONS
QA Program (if Applicable) Built in Proc Freqs

4.4.2 First Generation

This data set contains those students who were identified as a first generation college student or FGEN. First generation status is defined as a student whose parents’/guardians’ highest level of education was high school (D’Amico 1998). If one parent/guardian had a level of education higher than high school the student is not considered first generation.

First Generation Students ETL
param response
Description First Generation
Contact Tamara Blocker
Contact Office Admissions
Input File Type Excel File
Method of Retrieval File sent on request
Frequency of Update Each Fall
Record Type student
ETL File Name Building FR cohort file_4_admissions.sas
Output Data Set Name XADMISSIONS (first gen)
QA Program (if Applicable) Built in Proc Freqs

4.4.3 Institutional Committee

Institutional committee refers to those students who are identified by the President, Provost, and advancement.

Institutional Committee ETL
param response
Description Institutional Committee
Contact Tamara Blocker
Contact Office Admissions
Input File Type Excel File
Method of Retrieval File sent on request
Frequency of Update Each Fall
Record Type student
ETL File Name Building FR cohort file_4_admissions.sas
Output Data Set Name XADMISSIONS (inst cmt)
QA Program (if Applicable) Built in Proc Freqs

4.4.4 High School GPA

Students’ high school GPA is recorded in a separate file. Based on our application process8 and the variety of different schools practices these data are collected as an open text file. This practice makes tabulation of data very difficult because it is unknown if the GPAs are weighted or not as well as leaves uncertain the denominator. As such the ETL program makes several estimates in order to arrive at a standardized High School GPA for each student.

  1. The student’s high school is assigned a flag if the school offers AP/IB programs
  2. If a letter grade is offered it is parsed to a numeric equivalent (e.g. A = 4.0, A- = 3.67, …)
  3. If the GPA is provided with a numerator and denominator then those are separated into two columns (e.g. 3.9/4 becomes num = 3.9, denom = 4)
  4. If the numerator is greater than 50, then a denominator is assumed to be 100 (e.g. if a GPA of 98 is recorded, then the denominator is assumed to be 100)
  5. The maximum denominator by school district is calculated and joined with the data (based on some research most of the grading is standardized across districts and less often with a state)
  6. The scaled GPA is then calculated by taking the numerator and dividing by the denominator to generate a scaled GPA between 0 and 1

This program makes some strong assumptions, but additional verification of these data shows that it is mostly correct.9

High School GPA ETL
param response
Description High School GPA
Contact Tamara Blocker
Contact Office Admissions
Input File Type Excel File
Method of Retrieval File sent on request
Frequency of Update Term
Record Type student
ETL File Name Building FR cohort_file_4_hs_gpa
Output Data Set Name xhs_gpa
QA Program (if Applicable) NA

References

D’Amico, Aurora. 1998. “First-Generation Students: Undergraduates Whose Parents Never Enrolled in Postsecondary Education,” 100.

  1. See https://admissions.wfu.edu/apply/process/ for additional details regarding the Wake Forest admissions process.↩

  2. Wake Forest accepts several different applications including the Common App, a custom Wake Forest app, and several others↩

  3. See \\admin2\instres\Graduate Student Assistant\2018-19 Samantha\0829-1024 HSgpa Project for the details on a validation study completed by one of the graduate students in the office. She found that this methodology was appropriate↩