Calculus Is an Admissions Barrier—Even for Students Who Weren’t Offered It

Although many engineering schools don’t include calculus as an admission requirement, the course can still be overly weighted in admissions.

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Can calculus make or break a college application? New research says yes: A study of 292 admissions officers found the officers were less likely to admit a prospective engineering student if they hadn’t taken calculus—even if their high school didn’t offer the class.

The research team led by BK Byun, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan and part of the Michigan Admissions Collaboratory, sought to understand how calculus affected STEM students’ admissions chances. Although many engineering programs don’t require students to take high school calculus to be admitted, Byun hypothesized that admissions officers might in practice be biased toward applicants who have taken the class.

“Our research team thought this was an interesting issue because, in principle, institutions that say they practice holistic review should address these disparities by ensuring admission officers evaluate student achievement in context of the opportunities that have been available at their high school,” she said. “But surveys and interviews with admissions officers across the country [have shown] that even if institutions did not require calculus as a formal admissions requirement, admissions officers would evaluate the lack of calculus in different ways. So, we wanted to more empirically examine what was going on in admissions offices to examine this equity issue in a little more detail.”

The use of the class in admissions is a hot topic; a student’s success is calculus can predict how well they’ll do in engineering courses, and calculus is also foundational to the discipline. But calculus is only offered at about half of American high schools, and white and Asian students are more likely to have access to the course. Some colleges have in recent years re-evaluated the calculus requirement. Caltech, for example, accepts substitutions for calculus and some other STEM courses.

Holistic admissions, or the consideration of a range of factors outside of academic achievement to admit students, should theoretically prevent calculus from being a deciding factor. But Byun’s experiment, which asked real admissions officers to make decisions on fake application materials, showed otherwise.

Applications for students who hadn’t taken calculus because their high school didn’t offer it were recommended for admission 16.4 percent less than those who had taken calculus. That was true even though the profiles depicted students who had done all they could to be successful within their high school, taking the highest levels of math and science their school offered and receiving SAT scores that exceeded their high school’s averages.

Admissions officers were also asked to rate the applications on a 10-point scale, and those who hadn’t taken calculus on average received ratings a half point lower than those who had.

“I think [that’s] wild, because that’s basically saying, the student did everything they could in their own context to make themselves competitive for engineering admissions, but that still isn’t enough,” Byun said.

The study, which was recently accepted by the journal Educational Researcher, also looked at how long officers reviewed the student’s high school profile, which outlines details like the classes a school offers. The admissions officers who spent the least amount of time on the high school profile were significantly less likely to admit students who hadn’t taken calculus; among those participants, students who didn’t take calculus were 22.1 percent less likely than students who had taken calculus to be admitted. Those who spent the most time looking at the high school profile were still less likely to admit students who hadn’t taken calculus, but only by 11 percent. That remained true even when accounting for the total amount of time the officers had taken to review the application.

Calculus is essential for engineering students, Jenna P. Carpenter, past president of the American Society for Engineering Education, explained in an email to Inside Higher Ed: “Calculus (along with courses like chemistry and calculus-based physics) contains fundamental content that students must know and use in order to be ready to understand and pass their engineering courses. If students have not completed calculus prior to admission to engineering programs, they do need to complete the entire calculus sequence (most often consisting of four courses) in the first few semesters of college.”

Many institutions admit engineering students regardless of their prerequisites and have developed pathway programs to help students work their way through those courses, she wrote.

The study focused on calculus, but the course isn’t the only factor that researchers worry admissions officers might weigh too heavily. Because admissions decisions happen behind closed doors, Byun said, getting to the bottom of how admissions officers actually make their choices in practice can be difficult. Experiments like this one, known as “lab-in-the-field” experiments, can help illuminate those decisions.

Byun said there are other courses, like physics, that she suspects might also play an outsize role in admissions decisions. Similarly, she said engineering is likely not the only major calculus serves as a gatekeeper for.

“It’s not just calculus and engineering admissions that’s an equity issue here,” she said. “It can pertain to subjects that are not calculus, or it can pertain to different fields outside engineering admissions.”