The End of Meritocracy

Should the SAT Account for Race?
Opposing opinions by Nathan Glazer and Abigail Thernstrom

Yes.
By Nathan Glazer

This month, the Educational Testing Service (ETS), creator and marketer of the SAT--the most widely used test of academic ability and the key measure that colleges and universities take into account when making admissions decisions--announced that it is d eveloping a "Strivers" score, an adjustment of the SAT score to take into account a student's socioeconomic background and race, increasing the scores of those whose socioeconomic background or race is considered to put them at a disadvantage. Colleges an d universities will be able to use the new Strivers score, if they wish, in making their admissions decisions. The ETS will offer institutions both a "race-blind" model, which includes only social, economic, and educational factors, and a model that also takes into account race--that is, whether the applicant is black, Hispanic, or Native American. ETS's chief competitor, the American College Testing Program, which produces a test used by many institutions instead of the SAT, will be developing a similar model.

Clearly, these developments are a response to the crumbling of the legal support that colleges and universities have relied upon to justify the almost universal practice among selective institutions of giving some kind of preference to black and Hispanic students. And, just as surely, critics of racial preference in college admissions will not be mollified by the new Strivers score and other, similar new strategies. If the formula using race is factored into admissions decisions, the new procedure will be just as legally vulnerable as the existing formal or informal preferences for race that have been struck down by a federal appeals court ruling in a University of Texas case and are now being challenged in an important University of Michigan case. Nor, o ne would think, would the new approach survive in the courts of the states--California and Washington--where popular referenda have forbidden the states and their agencies, including colleges and universities, to take race into account when making admissi ons decisions. 

And, if the Strivers score without the race factor is used, present statistical patterns show that it will be less effective in identifying black students who may qualify for admission than the score that includes race as part of the formula. For race is indeed a factor in reducing test scores, independent of family wealth, education, and the other socioeconomic factors. It has a particularly strong independent effect in reducing scores for blacks, and, for most institutions, increasing the number of blac k students is a higher priority than increasing the number of Hispanic students.

What is most striking about the development of the Strivers score is the evidence it gives us of the strength of the commitment to maintaining a higher number of black and Hispanic students in selective institutions than would qualify on the basis of acad emic promise alone. It is not only the testing agencies that show this commitment. They are, after all, responding to their customers, the educational institutions, whose presidents and administrations universally support racial preference in admissions. They may call it "diversity," a softer and more benign term, but what diversity in practice means is more blacks than they would admit under admissions procedures that didn't take race into account. Writing in National Review, Stephan Thernstrom, a strong critic of racial preferences, informs us with disapproval that "[William] Bowen and [Derek] Bok argue [in their study of racial preference The Shape of the River] that administrators barred from using racial double-standards in admissions will elect to l ower standards for all applicants so as to secure enough non-Asian minorities in the student body."

While this is not quite their position--it is, rather, that administrators will do what they can to maintain the number of black students even when legal bans on taking race into account exist--the fact is that it is not administrators alone who will do t his in the effort to evade the clear effect of the elimination of race preference. The Texas legislature voted that the state university should consider the top ten percent of the graduating class of every Texas high school eligible for the state universi ty, a far more radical lowering of the standards for eligibility than any university administrator would have proposed. 

Even more remarkably, the Regents of the University of California, who had earlier voted that race could not be taken into account in admissions decisions, have voted that the top four percent of the graduates of every California high school should be eli gible for admission to the state university system! The Texas and California actions both radically expand the number of black and Hispanic students eligible for the state universities, for in both states there are many high schools almost exclusively His panic and black in composition that would not be capable of producing students eligible for the top branches of the state university without the new policies. 

The faculties of colleges and universities have not played much of a role in all this. Faculty members critical of racial preferences berate their colleagues for not speaking up--indeed, faculty members rarely speak up when a controversial issue does not affect them directly. But recent surveys show that the critics of racial preference will not get much support from university faculties. Although a recent survey of 34,000 faculty members conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute of the Univers ity of California at Los Angeles does not ask the racial preference question directly, it does ask whether "promoting diversity leads to the admission of too many underprepared students." Only 28 percent of respondents agreed. And 90.5 percent of responde nts agreed with the following statement, admittedly not much more controversial than arguing the virtues of motherhood: "A racially/ethnically diverse student body enhances the educational experience of all students."

Thus college and university faculty and administrators, state legislatures, and the ruling political bodies in charge of public universities all seem to have a commitment to maintaining the number of black and Hispanic students receiving higher education, and, bluntly, are willing to take evasive action to do it. They will use substitutes for race--and, if one substitute does not work, they will look for others. If focusing on applicants who live in a poor neighborhood doesn't help--perhaps there are too many Asians in one poor California neighborhood or another--they will try focusing on applicants who live in housing projects. One way or another, the commitment to enrolling more blacks than would qualify based on academic criteria alone will be pursued. 

I believe this commitment, however cloaked in subterfuge it may be, is a valid one. True, it has been clear from the beginning of affirmative action that the majority of the American population--and even a very substantial part of the black population--do es not like the idea of making an individual's fate dependent on his or her race or ethnic background. We are all, in principle, in favor of a race-blind society, and clearly that is an important principle, one that we all hope to realize in time. But it has turned out that the use of strict race-blind admissions procedures will radically reduce the number of black students, and in lesser measure the number of Hispanic students, in the selective institutions of higher education--key institutions of our so ciety. This can only serve to further divide non-Asian minorities and whites and to further postpone the day when we can achieve a truly race-blind, fully integrated society. And this is simply too high a price to pay for adhering to the principle of race -blind admissions today.

If, then, one accepts that admitting more non-Asian minorities than would make the cut through academic criteria alone is a legitimate goal, the Strivers score is not such a terrible way to achieve it. The new score, which is simply an adjustment of the a ctual SAT score, is based on the common observation that students from wealthier and more educated families, from well-to-do suburbs, from high schools with better students, and the like, will on average do better on the SAT than students from poorer and less-educated families and from worse high schools--the circumstances of a disproportionate number of minorities. It stands to reason that a student from a materially and educationally impoverished environment who does fairly well on the SAT and better th an other students who come from a similar environment is probably stronger than the unadjusted score indicates. In the past, those colleges and universities whose admissions staffs and procedures permitted individual evaluation of applications took such f actors into account informally. With the new Strivers score, they will have a statistical tool that includes no fewer than 14 characteristics that are expected to affect SAT scores. It will, of course, be up to individual institutions to decide whether th ey want to make use of the Strivers adjustment, just as individual institutions now determine how much weight the SAT score should have in the admissions decision. Still, the Strivers score may make what was essentially an intuitive system more rational.

Of course, there's a strong possibility that it may not survive the inevitable legal challenges. It also remains to be seen just how effective the new approach will be at maintaining or increasing the number of blacks and Hispanic students in our colleges and universities. For instance, it's possible that the main effect may be instead to increase the number of Asians, in which case the effectiveness of the Strivers adjustment would undoubtedly be reviewed.

But even if the Strivers score approach does not succeed, its introduction has highlighted the need for institutions under legal attack to improve the informal and messy procedures that they have been using to raise their enrollment of minority students. Perhaps we can bury the overt emphasis on race while trying to reach the same objective; perhaps race can become the dirty little secret we are trying to take account of without directly saying so. Hypocrisy in the matter may be no minor gain. But it is c lear that, for some time, if we are to maintain the appearance of being one nation when by many measures we are, in fact, two, a pure race-blind policy will be so strongly resisted that racial preference will by some means prevail. 

No.
By Abigail Thernstrom

The educational testing service (ETS) calls them "strivers." They could just as well be called the "but for" kids: kids who would have done better on their SATs but for ... their racial or ethnic identities, their families' income, the quality of their sc hools, and so forth. Or so ETS believes. These and other circumstances call for college admissions officers to treat these students' scores differently than they otherwise would, the company suggests. Never mind that selective colleges already take such f actors into account when weighing student applications. That inevitably subjective process is inadequate, ETS apparently believes. Schools with high admissions standards need further instruction and a tool to help read scores properly. "A combined score o f 1000 on the SATs is not always a 1000," Anthony Carnevale, an ETS vice president who heads the Strivers project, has said. "When you look at a striver who gets a 1000, you're looking at someone who really performs at a 1200." 

The students ETS has in mind are those who have done better than their demographic profile would predict. Carnevale suggests the low score is, in effect, a false negative, but ETS has evidently decided to leave the actual process of readjusting scores up to the schools themselves. It will provide the unadjusted score and a statistical formula that colleges can use to convert it to the Strivers number, should they so choose. 

Or so it seems. In the wake of negative press, the company released an obfuscating memo denying any current "program or service based upon the Strivers research." But it did not rule out offering a "program or service" once its final report is completed-- in about two months. "Researchers" have been "studying the effect of considering additional background information" in order to "provide a richer context for candidates' scores," the memo explained. "ETS is committed to continuing a dialogue about fairnes s and equity in higher education." 

That ongoing "dialogue" has largely been prompted, of course, by the end of the use of racial preferences in admissions decisions in public higher education in Texas, California, and Washington state. Although University of Michigan President Lee Bollinge r recently declared diversity to be "as vital as teaching Shakespeare or mathematics," the University of Michigan's own race-based admissions processes will soon be on trial in a federal district court. Suits against other elite colleges (all of which sor t students on the basis of race and ethnicity) are sure to follow. But ETS may be riding to the schools' partial rescue with a formula that gives a pseudoscientific imprimatur to setting lower SAT standards for "disadvantaged" students. 

ETS broadens the definition of disadvantage beyond race and ethnicity and is said to be working on two formulas. One will factor in race. The other will reportedly focus on only such variables as the employment status of the student's mother and the kinds of electrical appliances and number of books in the student's home, as reported--accurately or inaccurately--by the student. Thus, the University of California and the handful of other schools that are no longer allowed to make race-based admissions deci sions will be able to use it. A formal acknowledgment that disadvantage comes in all colors and many forms would certainly be a step forward. But not a very big one. Expanding the universe of preferential admits does not solve the basic problem. ETS is si mply adding more variables to a victimology index and reinforcing the already-too-widespread belief that demography is destiny. And once you start factoring in variables that lead to disadvantage, where do you stop? Should you take into account an applica nt's birth order? Her relationship with her parents? The psychologists haven't even gotten into the act yet.

Of course, literally no one believes that SAT scores alone should determine who gets into which schools. And, in fact, no college entirely ignores the "context" that ETS wants to stress. But does ETS really want high schools telling a black kid in the Bro nx that no one expects him to do as well as the Vietnamese immigrant in his class? Should a teacher say to a white student from a low-income family, "I'll count your C in math as an A? You come to the test with a disadvantage; I understand."

Across the nation, states are getting serious about promoting high academic standards in their elementary and secondary schools. But, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, anti-testing voices have argued that it is simply unfair to expect suburban skills in urb an schools with high concentrations of non-Asian minority kids. Teachers, critics say, are being asked to achieve the impossible. Moreover, the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education has recently weighed in with an attack on all high-s takes testing as potentially discriminatory. 

Without doubt, school is easier for children who grow up in affluent and educated households. And yet, without tough tests and uniformly high expectations, the academic performance of black and Hispanic children--which, on average, is woefully behind that of whites and Asians--is unlikely to improve. ETS is proposing to send the worst possible message to these kids: If you start out in life with less, we expect less of you--today, tomorrow, maybe forever. The die has been cast. The fix is in. 

The students who meet high academic expectations in the kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade years are likely to do well on the SATs, and for most students those tests are excellent predictors of how they will fare in college. As a consequence (as Carnevale surely knows), a score of 1000 is simply not the same as 1200; the lower-scoring student is less academically prepared. Even a score of 1200 means a rough academic ride for students at universities such as Princeton and Stanford, where the median SAT sco re exceeds 1400. 

If elite schools want to become nonselective, or if they want to choose their matriculants randomly from the pool of applicants with scores over, say, 1000, who could object on grounds of principle? Needless to say, their fancy professors and devoted alum ni might not like the idea. The physics professor who is a Nobel laureate generally wants to teach high-powered students, and the alumni like the prestige that accompanies highly selective admissions. A more random system would let in plenty of strivers, but the schools themselves would change. Students who were less prepared would require less rigorous courses--unless the colleges suddenly became willing to flunk them out. 

ETS is obviously trying to suggest otherwise. Strivers (by definition) have tried harder and thus can do as well as the kid with the much higher SAT, the testing service implies. The disadvantaged student with a score of 1000 will do just as well as the p rivileged one who got 1200. 

Well, maybe, in some cases. But the notion rests on a questionable assumption--namely that a score of 1000, when it beats a racial or other group norm, represents extraordinary effort. That may not be the case. Perhaps the student from an impoverished fam ily who seems to have beaten the SAT odds is simply good at taking standardized tests. Or perhaps her parents have intangible qualities that the ETS formula has failed to capture. It is even possible that she didn't try hard enough--that she is underperfo rming relative to her intellectual gifts. Her score may reflect academic talent, not hard work. In fact, if ETS is serious about finding the kids who really "strive," it might make much more sense to look at grade point averages, adjusted for the difficul ty of the courses taken. Arguably, it is the student with a low SAT score but a high GPA who has demonstrated dedication and perseverance--true grit. 

In addition, there is no evidence that students who outscore peers with the same demographic characteristics will experience exceptional intellectual growth in college. In general, for unknown reasons, black students, for instance, earn substantially lowe r grades in college than their SATs would lead us to predict. (This is one of the buried but depressing facts contained in William Bowen and Derek Bok's pro-affirmative-action book, The Shape of the River.) Another recent study, which focused on Universit y of San Diego undergraduates, looked not only at blacks and Hispanics but also at the records of students who attended impoverished high schools, came from low-income families, or lived in neighborhoods with few college graduates. These disadvantaged you ths also underperformed, by the measure of their SAT scores. 

Most important, why should the measure of achievement be a group norm? Asians do better than whites on math SATs; should whites who outperform the white group norm be given special preference? Should a high-scoring Asian be rejected from MIT if she beats the non-Asian competition but scores lower than Asians in general? In fact, both Asians and Jews will suffer under any leveling scheme that penalizes applicants who come from more prosperous and bettereducated homes. These two groups are strikingly overre presented on elite campuses today, precisely because they score so high on the SATs. Asians constitute only four percent of the population, but they represent almost a quarter of all students scoring above 750 on the math SATs, with the result that they m ake up nearly one-fifth of the student body at Harvard and a quarter or more at MIT and Cal Tech. It appears that the end of racial preferences in California has primarily benefited Asians. 

ETS is perfectly right, of course, to say that race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status correlate with SAT scores. And SAT scores, the company should add, correlate with college performance. Instead of trafficking in group stereotypes, endlessly tinkerin g with scores, giving extra points for this or that sort of disadvantage, and pretending lower-scoring students are competitive when they are not, why not just educate the kids? Does ETS believe good schools are an impossible dream? Shame on it, if it doe s.

Abigail Thernstrom is the coauthor of America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, and, more recently, "Reflections on The Shape of the River," UCLA Law Review, June 1999.

(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)