Lots of recent news stories tell us that the College Board is adding an “adversity score”— looking at crime, poverty, and other demographic data from students’ neighborhoods and high schools — to the SAT scores it reports to universities for their applicants. This has attracted much attention and comment, so allow a poor but somewhat honest lawyer to put in his two cents’ worth.
The principal point I’ll make is that, as a legal matter, this is of limited interest.
In admitting students, schools are free to take into account pretty much whatever they like, with the notable exception of race — though of course race is the elephant in the room here. So if the index does notconsider race, as we’re told by the College Board it does not, and is not used by schools as a proxy for race, then there’s no legal issue. And if race is considered, either directly by the College Board or as a proxy for race by schools using the index, then for now schools will defend that consideration as narrowly permitted by the Supreme Court.
On the other hand, when the happy day (that the Center for Equal Opportunity has been working for) arrives that the Court says that race may not be considered, then that will prevent schools from considering it directly, and from deliberately choosing other criteria that serve as a proxy for race, and from having a middleman like the College Board do the direct or indirect discrimination for them.
On to my policy observations: I’m agnostic on what the College Board is really up to, and it might have mixed motives, as we say in the antidiscrimination biz. I suspect a large part of what’s going on here is addressing the problem of more and more schools dropping the SAT requirement, because of the problems its consideration poses for achieving “diversity.” By providing this index, the College Board encourages schools to keep using the test by giving them another tool that can lead to more politically correct numbers. So the main motive may be neither black nor white but green.
I’m willing to believe, too, that the College Board is also motivated in part by the recognition that two students with identical SAT scores can have different academic potentials — if, say, student A got his score in a highly supportive environment that included well-paid tutors and the like, while student B got his score while dodging bullets at home and at school.
That’s an unexceptionable point, and it’s good that the College Board is incorporating it in a way that at least on its surface does not use race as a proxy for disadvantage.
Still, the problem is that, if one took this kind of inquiry seriously, then one would look most carefully at the home and family environment of the individual student, and the new index ignores all that and instead considers only the more general environment of the school and neighborhood.
The logical approach that would recognize individual adversities would be more expensive, which is a problem for the College Board, and might well lead to a lot of those pesky Asian Americans, to say nothing of hillbilly whites, getting index scores as high or higher than African Americans and Latinos — the groups whom do-gooding schools are really after.
I should note, finally, that anything that diminishes the consideration given to actual merit will lead to mismatch, and that there’s also the moral hazard of encouraging parents to put or keep their children in environments that are bad for them but good for their index scores.
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Speaking of college admissions and those pesky Asian Americans: Sometime in the next few months we’re expecting the judge to hand down her decision in the case alleging that Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans. The Center of Equal Opportunity has published two papers on the issues in this litigation, and has helped write and joined an amicus brief also supporting the challenge (you can find links to all of this in the second paragraph here).
Much has been made of the apparent similarity between the way Harvard currently has set a quota aimed at limiting the number of Asian American students to the now-universally-condemned policy of yesteryear that set an anti-Jewish quota.
But here’s a question for you: Given Harvard’s position, why wouldn’t it be lawful for it to treat Jews explicitly like it treats Asian American applicants? That is, if a school wants to give a preference to underrepresented group X because otherwise there would be relatively too many of overrepresented group not-X, and the Court okays that, then why does this justification pass legal muster if X is blacks and not-X is whites/Asians, but not if X is Gentiles and not-X is Jews?
To elaborate just a bit: The diversity argument is that a school can weigh ethnicity in order to achieve the educational benefits that accrue by ensuring that there is not too much duplication of student backgrounds/outlooks — that there’s a richer mix. Well, if that works when the claim is that the black background/outlook is not enough in the mix, then why shouldn’t it work if the claim is that the Jewish background/outlook is too much in the mix?
