Should the SAT Account for Race?
September 27, 1999

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 developing 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 and 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, one 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 admissions 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 black 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 academic 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 lower 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 this 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 university, 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 eligible 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 Hispanic 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 University 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 respondents 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--does 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 society. 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 actual 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 than 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 factors 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 they 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 clear 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.

© 1999 The New Republic