Psychometric Screening as a Sustainable Enrollment Management Tool: Toward Reducing Educational Mismatch and Advancing SDG 4.4

Universities admit students on thin evidence. Where admission rests on an examination score and the judgment of a committee, mismatch between an applicant’s profile and the demands of a degree program surfaces later as disengagement, attrition, and wasted institutional resources. This paper treats that outcome as a problem of decision quality and frames admission as selection risk management, by analogy with personnel selection in human resource management, where psychometric evidence is long established as a way of reducing the cost of a poor match. We set out the managerial chain connecting screening to sustainable human capital formation under SDG 4.4, state which link this study tests and which remain hypotheses, and report the evidentiary step any such system presupposes: whether the instrument in use measures anything dependable. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of two blocks completed by Generation Z applicants at a Central Asian university (abilities, 45 items, N = 839; personality, 60 items, N = 807) retained seven factors in each block. Reliability is weak: only six of the fourteen retained factors reach 0.70 on Cronbach’s α and McDonald’s ω, and eight fall below it. Confirmatory fit was poor for the ability block (CFI = 0.789, SRMR = 0.117) and good for the personality block (CFI = 0.962, SRMR = 0.062), though in the latter the factors intercorrelate up to 0.895, which limits their discriminant interpretation. The instrument therefore requires revision before subscale-level use. The principal contribution is managerial: an institutional integration model specifying how screening evidence enters admission and advising decisions, with an explicit account of the evidential conditions a university must satisfy before acting on such instruments.