Admissions Impossible: California without the SAT
March 19, 2001

Abigail Thernstrom & Stephan Thernstrom

The president of the University of California, Richard C. Atkinson, has endorsed a bad idea: abandon the SAT, and thereby increase the racial and ethnic "diversity" of UC's many campuses. The SAT is the basic test of verbal and quantitative reasoning that virtually all applicants to competitive colleges have long had to take. A few small colleges have recently eliminated the exam as an admissions requirement, but the large research universities and most prestigious colleges find it indispensable. If America's most distinguished public higher-education system—the University of California—junks the SAT and redefines academic merit, it could send ripples of deeply troubling change across the nation.

President Atkinson asks UC's academic senate to consider two changes in admissions policy. First, he recommends that the university "require only standardized tests that assess mastery of specific subject areas rather than undefined notions of ‘aptitude' or 'intelligence."' He would not eliminate (for now) the SAT Ils, which are achievement tests in English, math, physics, French, and other subjects. But gone would be the SAT I, the main exam that has traditionally identified diamonds in the rough—students who come from lousy schools and haven’t learned much, but who are nevertheless extremely promising academically.

Atkinson also recommends that "all campuses move away from admission processes that use narrowly defined quantitative formulas and instead adopt procedures that look at applicants in a comprehensive, holistic way." So, the SAT Ils stay, but should be weighed lightly. Atkinson hopes to "ensure that standardized tests [in general] do not have an undue influence" on admissions decisions. They should "illuminate the student's total record."

What counts as part of a "total record"? Part of the answer, at least, is perfectly clear: the disadvantage under which all black and Hispanic students presumably labor. UC, says Atkinson, must "be mindful that it serves the most racially and ethnically diverse college-going population in the nation. The University must be careful to make sure that its standards do not unfairly discriminate against any students." Atkinson knows full well that the admissions process does not "unfairly discriminate" against Asian students. And he certainly doesn't believe whites get a raw deal. Clearly, he is referring to non-Asian minority students under a system that relies on SAT I scores.

Is there any truth to his charge of discrimination? Without question, the UC student body is not a microcosm of the state. Today, a remarkable 45 percent of the undergraduates at Berkeley are Asian Americans, and the percentage at UCLA is 41. As Asian Americans make up 12 percent of California's population, they have more than triple their "share" of places on the two top campuses of this mighty system. In that system as a whole, they constitute 39 percent of the undergraduate student body.

Given the huge Asian presence at these schools, all other elements of the population are inevitably "underrepresented," especially at Berkeley and UCLA. As most people know, the proportion of black and Hispanic students at those two campuses has declined sharply since the abolition of racial double standards in admissions a few years ago. What is less well known is that non-Hispanic whites are also substantially "underrepresented" on both campuses. They account for half the population of the state, but are only a third of the Berkeley student body, and just a shade above that (36 percent) at UCLA. Here is striking evidence that the American Dream is alive and well—that meritocracy works and is not a mere mask for "white privilege." A population group made up largely of people whose roots in the country are only a generation old has quickly climbed to the top of the educational ladder in vastly disproportionate numbers.

Great news, one would think. But the president of the University of California disagrees. The meritocratic admissions policies that have produced the current UC student body, Richard Atkinson believes, are inconsistent with "American ideals of fairness and egalitarianism."

Why in the name of fairness and egalitarianism should we prefer the SAT subject tests to those that assess verbal and quantitative reasoning? Atkinson frets about teachers "under pressure to teach to the test" and affluent parents (white, he presumes) who enroll their children in SAT prep courses. But his real concern is the reputation of the main SAT and its impact on blacks and Hispanics. "Leaders of minority communities perceive the SAT to be unfair," he states, and those perceptions "cannot be so easily dismissed." "Most troubling of all, SAT scores can have a profound effect on how students regard themselves." Those who do badly come to doubt "their basic worth."

One might think that the SAT Ils, assessing subject-matter knowledge, are open to the same criticisms as the SAT I: that teachers teach to the test, etc. The difference between the exams, as Atkinson perceives it, is not spelled out in the major speech he gave on February 18. But his point seems evident between the lines. The basic SAT is viewed, he says, as "akin to an IQ test—a measure of innate intelligence" (although the College Board makes no such claim); but a low score on a world-history exam can be readily understood as indicative of nothing more than an absence of opportunity (that is, lousy teaching). This is a distinction, however, that most foes of the SATs would not accept. They read the scores on both forms of the SAT as a reflection of race and social class.

Says Atkinson, students should always be judged in a "holistic" manner—"on the basis of what they have made of the opportunities available to them," and the "environment" in which they are raised. "A student who has made exceptional progress in troubled circumstances needs to be given special, attention." Fair enough. But all college admissions officers are already on the lookout for kids who beat the demographic odds—who have done well in "troubled circumstances." President Atkinson seems to have something more radical in mind: assessing applicants "in their full complexity" rather than on the basis of "narrowly defined quantitative formulas." Grades and test scores are not to be taken at face value, as a measure of whether students have the academic skills to flourish in a competitive intellectual environment. Their significance is entirely relative.

It is possible, of course, that many on the faculty at Berkeley and UCLA, particularly, will oppose the abolition of the SAT. They will worry about the quality of the student body, and the prestige that fabulous students lend to the school. Many of those fabulous students are Asians, who will be the big losers if UC's academic senate signs on to the president's proposal. The extraordinary "overrepresentation" of Asian-American students on campuses today is the result of their demonstrated academic excellence. Very few were picked because they were jocks or "natural leaders." Moreover, if UC starts to give new weight to socioeconomic disadvantage, Asian-American applicants will further suffer. Their families rank well above the California average in income, education, and all other such measures. And they are more likely than members of any other group (including whites) to come from stable, two-parent families.

There is another problem. Atkinson, at the moment, has two incompatible aims: retaining "some form of standardized testing" and increasing the number of black and Hispanic students at the most selective campuses. The tests he proposes to retain, the SAT Ils, will serve the first purpose and defeat the second. The impact of these achievement tests on non-Asian minority admissions is no different from that of the SAT I. That is, most students who score in the top 5 or 10 percent on the verbal portion of the SAT I will also score at the top in the SAT Il English test. And there is no reason to think that a student who does poorly on the SAT verbals is more likely to shine on the English achievements. An examination of the SAT II scores reveals the same glaring group differences in performance so evident in SAT I scores. Whites and Asians vastly outnumber blacks and Hispanics at the top.

Thus, if greater "diversity" is the aim, the SAT Ils, too, will at some point have to go. Admissions decisions will have to be made on the basis of grades and "holistic" criteria. And making admission more dependent on high-school grades, we now know, won't do the trick. A study released by the UC admissions office in January 1998 estimated that eliminating both forms of the SAT and relying on high-school grade point averages alone would increase the number of Hispanics slightly. But that move surprisingly, would cut the number of blacks on the eight campuses by 17 percent. Asian enrollments would also decline a bit—by 3 percent.

Over the long run, good education in the K–12 years should increase the black and Hispanic presence in the UC system. But the only quick and easy method of getting the numbers up is to make race and ethnic identity the decisive ingredient in the "holistic" package. At that point, of course, the university's admissions policies would violate Proposition 209, although perhaps the process of scrutinizing applicants will seem sufficiently subtle to survive judicial scrutiny.

Those of us who supported the 1995 decision of the UC regents to abolish racial preferences in the university system, and, a year later, Proposition 209, banning racial considerations in admissions, employment, and contracting across the state, naively thought that California would be forced to abandon racial criteria in the public sector. We've been proven wrong. The academy will never give up, as William G. Bowen and Derek Bok predict at the end of The Shape of the River, their brief for affirmative action in higher education. If colleges are forbidden to take race into account, the authors say, they will refuse to accept the decline in black and Hispanic enrollment that will inevitably follow. If barred from using racial double standards, they will be compelled to lower standards across the board in order to obtain more non-Asian minorities.

The cost, Bowen and Bok acknowledge, will of course be a lower intellectual level of the student body as a whole, but that is the choice elite schools will make: "It is very difficult to stop people from finding a path toward a goal in which they firmly believe." If forced to choose, today's educational leaders will see creating a certain racial mix on campus as more important than maintaining intellectual standards. Intellectual excellence will be sacrificed on the altar of diversity.

They sure got that depressing point right.

©2000 National Review

About Abigail Thernstrom: articles, bio, and photo
About Stephan Thernstrom: articles, bio, and photo