BK Byun is a PhD candidate in Higher Education at the University of Michigan. Her research examines how policies and organizational processes can be redesigned to support more equitable decision-making, with a focus on selective college admissions. Specifically, she studies how variation in admissions officers’ personal and professional backgrounds—in combination with organizational priorities and institutional routines—shape what happens at key decision points in ways that either expand or constrain opportunity for underrepresented and racially minoritized students. Methodologically, she draws upon lab and field experiments as well as qualitative interviews to improve the field’s measurement of admissions practices that are difficult to capture through a single approach. In ongoing work, she combines in-depth qualitative interviews with a large-scale audit experiment involving admissions officers to test whether and how diversifying the current admissions workforce may support equitable recruitment, in an environment where many formal tools once used to advance diversity have been dismantled. BK’s research has been published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, AERA Open, and the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.
