SAT adversity vs. diversity

By Jason Lim

Admitting that parents' wealth, education levels, home locations, etc. are better indicators of SAT scores, the College Board has announced the implementation of an "adversity score." It's an index score based on several metrics which purports to represent the amount of adversity a student would have faced. Colleges have the option of taking this score into consideration when selecting applicants for acceptance. The score would give colleges more context to gauge an individual student's test performance in light of their background.

According to TIME, "The adversity score ― which will be shared with colleges and universities along with a student's SAT performance ― is based on 31 data points that, according to research, are correlated with academic achievement. They include factors associated with an applicant's neighborhood (such as the percentage of adults with less than a high school diploma) and those tied to a student's high school (such as the number of Advanced Placement courses offered)."

Let's be honest. This is basically reverse―affirmative action targeting Asian Americans. Faced with growing criticism and litigation over artificially limiting the percentage of qualified Asian American students, colleges have basically outsourced their implicit quota to the College Board under the guise of the adversity score.

The problem that top colleges face with the academic success of Asian American students is a difficult one. If the acceptance criteria are not at least partially based on race, then an overwhelming percentage of the incoming student body will be Asian. In California where race cannot be considered a factor in college acceptance, Berkeley's Fall 2018 matriculation demographics has Asians at about 40 percent and Caucasians at 25 percent. Contrast this with Hispanics at 15 percent and blacks at 3 percent. Then, how do you adjust the acceptance formula to make this demographic more representative of the at-large population?

An additional constraint is the legacy students. At Harvard, legacy students make up around 14 percent of the incoming student body. Needless to say, legacy students tend to be from wealthy white families who give more to the school's endowment. So, there is a business incentive to ensure that legacy students, with everything else being the same, enjoy an edge when it comes to acceptance. This leaves Asian Americans as a natural and easy target for redressing the racial imbalance at the nation's top colleges.

Ultimately, this is about competing fairness. Giving preference to historically discriminated (and still suffering systemic bias) populations such as Hispanic and black Americans is addressing the fairness issue by giving them academic opportunities that lead to socioeconomic success. On the other side, however, it's unfair to penalize Asian American students who have worked hard and sacrificed in order to academically excel and perform well on standardized tests. They haven't been given anything. They earned their achievements. Penalizing them based on race is textbook racist.

But schools are trying to come up with ways to do exactly that. At Harvard, it was the personality scores; according to The Atlantic, "One of the most striking revelations pertains to Harvard's consideration of applicants' soft skills ― things like likability, helpfulness, integrity, and courage ― in determining their acceptance. Despite boasting higher test scores, better grades, and stronger extracurricular resumes than applicants of any other racial group, Asian American applicants consistently received lower rankings on those personality traits, according to a statistical analysis conducted on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions (who is suing Harvard over its purported discriminatory admissions policies) of more than 160,000 student records. This emphasis on personality, the analysis concludes, significantly undermined otherwise-qualified Asian Americans' chances of getting in."

The problem I have with the adversity score is that it assumes that people are static recipients of social engineering schemes. Does the College Board not think that "tiger parents" won't get divorced, move to bad neighborhoods, put their children into poor schools, take a lower-paying job, and do everything necessary to game the score? If you incentivize certain criteria for acceptance, people will naturally adjust to optimize their chances. Marriage status and zip codes are just additional levers that parents will pull to give their children the best chances at going to the best schools.

This is not an ethical issue. It's a priority issue. The College Board is correct in linking SAT scores to students' family background. Well, family background is more than wealth and school districts. It's the willingness of parents to do what it takes to ensure their children's success. It won't be easy, but it will be perceived as something parents owe to their children. After all, the first-generation Asian American immigrants twisted their backs in delis and slaved over hot steam in drycleaners to get their kids to become ― for a vast majority ― the first college graduates in their families. This sense of self-sacrifice is the real key to Asian American's academic success. And an enduring inheritance that won't be easy to engineer out of the college acceptance formula.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.