Who deserves to go to university?  Particularly the prestigious ones with selective admissions? 

It’s easy enough to say “everyone”, or “anyone with the ability to benefit from it”, but when it comes to any specific institution, usually the demand for spaces exceeds the supply.  When that happens, some type of rationing procedure comes into play.  In nearly every country in the world (Canada is a rare exception), this rationing gets done either partly or completely on the basis of a set of standardized exams.  And guess what?  In every country in the world, we see the children of the privileged clogging up the spots at these top institutions, because cultural capital replicates itself across generations with a vengeance when it comes to academic results.

Now, there are various ways one can deal with this.  One can ignore the problem, and claim that results are results and everyone takes the same exam and so how much fairer can you get?  This is the dominant response in much of Europe (in particular the eastern bits) and pretty much all of East Asia.  One can create a system of reserving spots in institutions for specific underserved populations.  This is the Indian approach, where 49.5% of university places are reserved for Schedule Tribes, Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Castes (a few places in Europe offer something similar, with Romanian universities have guarantee spots for Roma students and Sciences Po in France having direct reservation for students from high schools in disadvantaged areas.

And then there is the United States of America.  Our neighbours to the south are a deeply conflicted bunch.  On the one hand, they love selective institutions and “meritocratic” admissions and have a massive testing industry devoted to helping work out which young Americans have such merit.  On the other hand, they are perfectly aware of the affect that race and income (they tend not to use the word class) affect test scores, and so spend ungodly amounts of time and effort devising ways to “contextualise” admissions processes in order to improve diversity despite a key 40-year old Supreme Court ruling (University of California v. Bakke) preventing universities from formally taking race into account.

It’s complicated, to put it mildly.

So it was quite a big deal last week when the College Board, which owns the widely-used SAT, announced that henceforth it would be assigning every applicant an “adversity score” from 0-100, based on the characteristics of the high school they attended.  This adversity score would not, on its own, adjust the test scores; rather, it would simply provide a simple two-digit score which encapsulates the degree of deprivation at a particular school (e.g. housing instability in the surrounding area, the percentage of students receiving free lunches) which the institution could use as it saw fit to interpret an applicants’ scores.

There have been a number of criticisms of the plan.  The most significant, probably, is that this is a band-aid solution: if the College Board thinks it’s important to contextualize scores because SAT results are too closely linked to family social status then maybe the Board should just fix the test.  On the face of it, that’s not an illegitimate criticism; the problem is that no one really knows how to create such a test, and by comparison creating an adversity score seems relatively simple.  The second criticism is that it measures adversity based on the characteristics of school, not an individual.  For those schools that have the resources to do highly individualized assessments of individual applicants, this might seem like a step backwards.  On the other hand, results don’t lie.  A randomized control trial conducted at selective schools that participated in a pilot scheme over the past few years showed that admission officers who had access to an adversity score became substantially more likely to recommend such students than those who did not.  So, while there may be some objections based on theory, it seems that the score works to widen access in practice.

(One mooted possibility, of course, is that the system might be open to gaming, that rich parents might try to get their kids into “high adversity score” schools in order to improve their chances of getting into a good university.  This would be a fantastic development – getting rich parents to care about schools in poor districts would revolutionize almost every part of K-12 educational politics in America).

The score isn’t perfect, obviously.  Perhaps most importantly, the score being assigned to each school is not being released to the general public.  An institution receiving an application from a student at school X can know the score but the applicant her/himself does not.  Given the level of general paranoia and racial politics in the United States, this seems like a bad idea: it seems all too obvious how claims of conspiracies and favouritism might spread and fester.  One hopes this aspect might change in future. 

Meanwhile, however imperfect this new measure is, it seems to hold real possibility to widen access to selective institutions.  And, perhaps more importantly, it represents an important acknowledgement about inequality in the US and how to lessen it.  Perhaps it does not deal head on with the most important generator of inequality (ie. race) and that may be cause for disappointment.  But in a post-Bakke United States this may be the best that can be hoped for.  And other parts of the world – particularly places like France and Japan – need to be watching too.  Their highly stratified systems could probably benefit quite a bit from a similar scheme.