The SAT can actually make admissions fairer: Study
Jack Elbaum
Video Embed
A much-discussed new study found that students from families in the top 1% of income have a significant advantage in college admissions. But it also featured another, less discussed yet possibly even more important, finding.
Let’s start with what has been at the top of the news. A new study from two Harvard professors and one Brown professor found, according to the New York Times, that “for applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted [to an Ivy or Ivy-adjacent school] than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.”
LACKS THE VOTES, HAS THE JOB: BIDEN KEEPING JULIE SU AS ACTING LABOR SECRETARY INDEFINITELY
A striking graph demonstrates the advantage enjoyed by students from families in the top 1%, and especially the top 0.1%, of earners.
But this may not be the most important finding of the study. After all, it is already widely known that the Ivy League is filled with those from households in the top 1% of income.
Rather, as journalist Zaid Jilani pointed out, the study also found that “greater reliance on SAT and less reliance on non-academic ratings = more middle-income kids admitted.”
https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1683536196788469772?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The study itself reads: If “colleges eliminate the three factors that drive the admissions advantage for students from high-income families — legacy preferences, the advantage given to those with higher non-academic ratings, and the differential recruitment of athletes from high-income families — and then refill the newly opened slots with students who have the same distribution of SAT scores as the current class. Under such an admissions policy, the share of students attending Ivy-Plus colleges from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution would rise by 8.7 percentage points.”
This is quite interesting. As schools are increasingly moving away from objective measures of merit such as the SAT in favor of more subjective criteria, some are celebrating this as a great equalizer. But that may not exactly be true. This study suggests it is overly subjective criteria — criteria that are not based on academic merit — that are creating unfair advantages for children from high-income families in the first place. And it is actually an added emphasis on the much-maligned SAT that can make the admissions process fairer.
The reason is that taking away objective measures such as the SAT not only allows, but forces, admissions officers to shape the class demographics in whatever way they believe is best, giving preference to whatever groups they prefer. Absent significant data to base their decisions on, this is inevitable. But the issue is that giving preference to a given group inherently entails disadvantaging those in another group, which we intuitively understand is unfair.
Additionally, those who defend such a practice in the present because they believe the institutions are choosing the “right” people to advantage open up a Pandora’s box they usually do not fully understand. Many defenders of affirmative action, for example, will call for an end to legacy admissions. And many of the defenders of legacy admissions will call for an end to affirmative action. But this is quite ironic because the two policies are justified on the same grounds of believing certain factors are simply more important than merit in the consideration of applicants such that some groups as a whole ought to be advantaged and others disadvantaged.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
But by taking away such subjective measures, and instead instituting a more merit-based system, those groups who were formerly disadvantaged will now be given greater opportunity. Within the context of this new study, it is everyone who is not in the top 1%. In other contexts, it could be other groups.
So before liberals remove the SAT as a requirement from every last university in America in the name of “equity,” they should take a moment to actually think about what they are doing.
Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.