“Adversity scores” are the latest gimmick to justify racial preferences in college admissions
This essay first appeared in Law & Liberty on May 23, 2019 (here). Thanks to Real Clear Policy, The College Fix (here), the James Martin Center for Academic Renewal (here), and the Foundation for Economic Education (here).
Higher education has been infiltrated—and hijacked—by race-obsessed progressives who, in the name of “diversity” and “inclusion,” seek to propagate an ideology of identity politics in order to foster group-based grievances against a culture they condemn as racist, sexist, patriarchal, ethnocentric, heteronormative, classist, and xenophobic (among numerous other perceived failings). Heather Mac Donald’s bracing book The Diversity Delusion (2018) exposed the agenda of leftist academic bureaucrats who in recent decades have—with great success—transformed the nation’s colleges and universities into indoctrination centers for their anti-Western canon.
Ideological balance on
college faculties, campus free speech, due process for
students accused of sexual misconduct, robust classroom debate on
“controversial” topics, tolerance for competing viewpoints, and even the
ultimate goal of higher
education–pursuit of knowledge itself (if it makes coddled students feel “triggered” or
“unsafe”)—have all been sacrificed on the altar of social justice, diversity, and political correctness. Since
this takeover of college campuses began in earnest during the 1970s, the only
significant resistance has come from the U.S. Supreme
Court, which in a series of muddled decisions–beginning with Bakke in 1978, continuing with Grutter (2003) and most recently Fisher
(2016)—has prohibited public universities from engaging in explicit racial preferences—quota-based affirmative action.
Unfortunately, however, the
Justices have deferred to the “expertise” of university administrators, allowing
admissions officers to consider race (among other factors) for the purpose of
realizing the presumed educational benefits of a “diverse” student body.
Applicants’ race is still a significant factor in the admissions process at
most schools, but colleges are careful to avoid leaving a paper trail
documenting their rigid numerical goals. As a practical matter, at many
selective schools less-qualified blacks are routinely admitted over white and
Asian candidates with much better grades and test scores in order to meet
demographic targets. Sly admissions officers use “holistic” methodologies—giving extra weight
to certain applicants’ “special circumstances” and “life experiences”—to
circumvent the ban on racial preferences. The transparent objective is
artificially to boost the percentage of under-represented groups (such as
African-Americans) enrolled, regardless of their qualifications.
At Harvard and other schools, Asian applicants are challenging such sub rosa techniques as de facto race discrimination, and some states (including California and Michigan) have banned state-funded schools from discriminating in admissions due to race. Undaunted, the diversity fraud continues apace, with enormous disparities in the test scores of admitted candidates based on their race. Asians, who would be over-represented in a purely meritocratic admissions process, are hurt most by the reverse discrimination, although the supposed beneficiaries—less-qualified minorities, especially blacks—are also harmed as a result of the “mismatch effect” documented by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor in their 2012 book, Mismatch. Increasingly, “diversity” in admissions is widely viewed as a barely-concealed artifice for race discrimination.
Thus, when the College Board
(which administers the widely-used SAT test) recently unveiled its new “adversity
score” to be assigned to all SAT-takers based on the socio-economic
characteristics of the students’ schools and neighborhoods, observers
were understandably skeptical. It didn’t help that David
Coleman, the College Board’s CEO, was an architect of Common Core, the controversial system of K-12 curriculum
content mandates that the Obama administration promoted nationwide. In addition
to assigning an objective SAT score based on the students’ performance on the
test, the College Board will give an additional, secret rating—disclosed to colleges during the application process
but not to the students themselves.
The rating takes into account the crime rate, poverty levels, and other factors
deemed to represent the degree of privilege or “adversity” in the students’ respective
communities, although the College Board declines to reveal what data it uses
and how it weighs the factors. According to news reports, “Other elements of the
adversity index include housing values, family median income, whether a student
is a child of a single parent, or speaks English as a second language.”
However the data is derived or weighed, lumping people together based on their zip code resembles nothing so much as the now-banned practice of banks and other financial institutions which rejected loan applicants based solely on where they lived. It was called “redlining,” and civil rights advocates condemned it as discrimination. Consumers applying for credit cards, mortgages, and other types of loans deserve to be judged on their individual merits, not based on their address or the general characteristics of their school, community, or neighbors. No one should be prejudiced by the actual or perceived faults of another—or receive credit for someone else’s actions. Applying to college is no different.
College admissions should be
based on merit: students’ intellectual
ability and aptitude for achievement. These qualities are not always accurately
reflected in applicants’ grades, class rank, and test scores. Sometimes other
factors warrant consideration. Human beings are unique, not fungible,
regardless of where they live or attend school. If college admissions officers wish
to look beyond objective metrics (such as SAT scores) to assess a candidate’s
academic potential, they can and
should consider the personal
characteristics of applicants: extra-curricular activities, demonstrated
leadership, special talents or athletic ability, evidence of overcoming
deprivation or family hardship through hard work and determination, and so
forth. (A candidate’s race or ethnicity should never be considered.)
Personal characteristics are highly individual in nature. No credible “adversity score” can be calculated based on the collective or aggregate characteristics of a particular neighborhood or high school. Such macro data-gathering is both crude and superficial. Generalizing in this manner—imputing group traits to an individual—is the essence of stereotyping, like denigrating people who live “on the wrong side of the tracks.” While purporting to be “scientific,” the adversity score is by definition imprecise—a statistical meat ax instead of a personalized scalpel. For example, it is unlikely that the College Board’s proprietary algorithms would have captured the pathos of J.D. Vance’s early life—as depicted in his remarkable memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016)—based only on his home town of Middletown, Ohio, or the public high school he attended there. Yet identifying the J.D. Vances of the world—diamonds in the rough—should be the goal of “holistic” review by college admissions officers, rather than simply meeting racial quotas.
Not all families who live in
primarily lower or lower-middle class neighborhoods are poor (or
“disadvantaged”), just as not all families who live in more affluent areas are
wealthy (or “privileged”). Students whose parents chose to send their
children to private school should not be at a categorical disadvantage versus
those who attended the local public school. Within any population—be it a high
school student body or a geographic area—there will be a distribution of
disparate data points which vary around the mean. This is why such populations
are graphically depicted by a bell curve
rather than a flat line. As one critic recognized, “Measuring neighborhood
adversity is not the same as assessing an individual student’s resilience or
grit.” The notion that “privilege” or “adversity” can be determined by assuming
uniformity among all students in a
particular school or neighborhood, and then reduced to a numerical score, is simply
absurd.
If colleges want to take applicants’
“adversity” into account, the only
way to do so fairly and accurately is to consider their life experience on an
individual basis—by listening to their personal stories. The College Board’s
latest innovation is, at best, a redistributionist effort to level the socio-economic
playing field by giving bonus points to applicants facing presumed hardship and
subtracting points for presumed privilege. This is not a proper role for
college admissions officers. Life is not a game of golf, and assigning
arbitrary “handicaps” in what should be a meritocratic process reeks of
unfairness. The Wall Street Journal correctly identified the real motive for
the College Board’s subterfuge, which is even worse than egalitarian social
engineering: “Colleges want to get out in front of a possible legal ban on
race-based preferences.” Many of the adversity score’s variables correlate with
minority status, and cynics understandably assume that the goal is to allow
colleges to continue to grant racial preferences surreptitiously—quotas by stealth.
With “holistic”
admissions—corrupted by diversity zealots into a pretext for racial and ethnic
preferences—increasingly being challenged as illegal discrimination, and the
SAT itself recently exposed as vulnerable to bribery and cheating, it is no
wonder that the SJWs running higher education have resorted to new tricks. The College Board’s “adversity
score” is obviously designed to serve as a proxy for race and to enable
colleges to grant racial preferences (and even to achieve racial quotas)
without–wink, wink—looking at the applicants’ race. The seemingly objective
“adversity score” provides a patina of neutrality to race-obsessed university
admissions officers.
Anthony Carnevale, a former
College Board employee now working for Georgetown University, admitted as much: “The purpose is to get to
race without using race.” The “adversity score” is, therefore, a scam—a hoax. Calling
the score a “backdoor to racial quotas in college admissions,” Heather Mac
Donald charged in City Journal that
Advocates of this change claim that it is not about race. That is a fiction…. Colleges pay lip service to socioeconomic diversity, but that concept is inevitably a surrogate for race…. The only guaranteed beneficiaries of this new scheme are the campus diversity bureaucrats. They have been given another assurance of academically handicapped students who can be leveraged into grievance, more diversity sinecures, and lowered academic standards.
Despite the obvious flaws in the adversity score, 50 colleges reportedly used it last year as part of a beta test. Incredibly, the Wall Street Journal states that “The College Board plans to expand it to 150 institutions this fall, and then use it broadly the following year.” University governing boards, alumni, parents of college applicants, legislators (in the case of state-funded schools), and perhaps even the U.S. Department of Education, should resist this outrageous end-run around the ban on racial preferences in admissions.
