>> Third, under test-optional policies, some less-advantaged students withhold test scores even in
cases where providing the test score would be a significant positive signal to Admissions.
Importantly, Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an
applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is
a more significant achievement than a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a
higher-income community with higher school-wide test scores. Admissions uses numerous
detailed measures of outcomes at the high school and neighborhood levels to account for these
known disadvantages. As one example, Admissions computes a measure of how each applicant
performs on standardized tests relative to the aggregate score of all test-takers in their high
school, using data available from the College Board.
> Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a higher-income community
And this is how you again discriminate based on race in a post-Affirmative Action world. The weight they assign to each context is completely arbitrary and tuned to achieve whatever objectives they have.
Affirmative action on the basis of socio-economic status is a good thing, and will replace affirmative action based on race. What surprises me is that you're surprised by this. Wasn't this called out by the Supreme Court in their judgement as a better alternative to the race based admissions they struck down?
> whatever objectives
They're very clear about their objectives too - they want more of their student body to come from a background of lower socioeconomic status.
You're absolutely right but that's not what's being done when the community income is being used rather than family income. This leads to many complexities, injustices, and people gaming the system.
People gaming the system? Are affluent kids moving into housing projects in order to get admitted into Dartmouth?
The fact is if they're in a public school in an underserved area, they are most likely going to a disadvantaged public school, and face strong headwinds trying to achieve the kinds of scores kids in affluent neighborhoods get.
Note also that multiple factors are being looked at.
Generally when such systems are implemented the levels are not binary, e.g. housing project vs affluent suburb. My point was that for some bimodal neighborhoods using the neighborhood income average is not effective. Is there a national, annually updated list of neighborhood underserved-ness list?
> Are affluent kids moving into housing projects in order to get admitted into Dartmouth?
This came up in Boston Public Schools. Admission to Boston Latin took into account the portion of a student body eligible for free lunch. It became mathematically impossible to be admitted to Latin if you weren't coming from a low income school.
Students at shools where 40% or more of the student body is classified as low income receive 10 points towards exam school entrance. [0] Being a poor kid at a rich school is a penalty, while being a rich kid at a poor school is a bonus.
A student attending a school without bonus points would need to score 97 points. Class rank is a factor which effectively imposes quotas on schools regardless of students grades and or test scores. Back around 2016 there were a handful of schools where students needed to score in excess of 100 points to get into Latin.
Last year 408 high income students received bonus points while 29 low income students did not. The admission rates for these groups were 85% and 55% respectively. [1]
They're explicitly tying academic performance in relation to one's socioeconomic background. I find their claim of "doing more with less being more impressive than doing more with more" reasonable.
The only way to avoid any sort of judgmental/arbitrary calls is to blindly apply academic standards (the way UT Austin does top 4% of your HS class) and that comes with its own problems.
It's not just socioeconomic background, it also includes 'how much your parents cared about your education', to some extent. For some families (think of the typical Asian immigrant family), getting the kids a good education is the first priority. They will sacrifice vacations, living in a nicer house, etc. in order to make sure their kids go to better schools and get better grades.
If you have two families that are equally poor, but where one family cares a lot about education and sends their kid to the harder school (perhaps by living in the cheapest apartment in the neighborhood that is eligible for that school), they will be disadvantaged compared to the other family, who send their kids to the less rigorous school.
To the extent that there are racial/cultural correlations that result in poor Asian kids going to schools that have higher average SATs than poor kids of other races, an ostensibly race-neutral policy like this will mean Asian students could (as a group) continue to face disadvantages in the admissions process.
It has to be asked out loud - do you think that the admissions departments at top universities haven't explicitly thought about this?
In a post-SFFA vs Harvard world, anecdotes and thought experiments carry very little water. We all know - and the universities are very explicit about this - that socio-economic indicators are the new affirmative action. It's clearly the only practical way to effect the sort of diversity missions that many Universities seek to establish (since by their own published work, it correlates with strong community-wide academic and scholarly outcomes0. At this point, since we all know what's going on, the only question to ask is, "Why didn't you try to game the system since you know how it works?"
I'm not passing judgment on whether this is a good or a bad thing, whether it's honest or dishonest, or whether it's fair or not. It's just reality. SFFA v Harvard is a _horrible_ decision based on absurd jurisprudence and a total divorce from the truths of the world we live in. I commend everyone from admissions boards to clever families who learn how to play the new rules of the game better than those who backed the jurisprudence in the first place.
> It has to be asked out loud - do you think that the admissions departments at top universities haven't explicitly thought about this?
Yes, I think they would use this as a facially-neutral way to achieve a race-motivated goal.
> We all know - and the universities are very explicit about this - that socio-economic indicators are the new affirmative action. It's clearly the only practical way to effect the sort of diversity missions that many Universities seek to establish
Are you saying they want to have racial diversity or SES diversity?
> SFFA v Harvard is a _horrible_ decision based on absurd jurisprudence and a total divorce from the truths of the world we live in. I commend everyone from admissions boards to clever families who learn how to play the new rules of the game better than those who backed the jurisprudence in the first place.
Can I ask what you found so objectionable? I understand that many people disagree with the outcome, but from a legal perspective (IAAL), I haven't heard much criticism.
> Are you saying they want to have racial diversity or SES diversity?
Because of structural racism and similar phenomena, they're not fully separable. It's not obvious to me they're even separable in a meaningful way (meaning that if you optimize for one, you simply won't get the same result as if you were to optimize for the other).
> Can I ask what you found so objectionable? I understand that many people disagree with the outcome, but from a legal perspective (IAAL), I haven't heard much criticism.
(IANAL, and it's been quite a while since I spent cycles on this so my recollection may be fuzzy) Fundamentally, I'm very uncomfortable with the dissonance in the concurring/dissenting opinions of Thomas/Sotomayor, respectively. My understanding was that they basically argue that the proposed standards by SFFA's lawyers are effectively unworkable, yet at the same time, there's very little to indicate that many - if any - universities were actually already out-of-compliance. In fact, in the aftermath of the case it seems as if most universities simply publicly doubled down on their existing diversity policies and missions.
So what's the point here? Why did SCOTUS accept to hear this? It seems like it was just taken up so that Roberts could fire up culture wars with the commentary he made in the majority opinion he authored.
It's hard to find virtue in something that claims to do a lot but in practice seems to do virtually nothing. So maybe it's incorrect to state that this is based on "absurd jurisprudence," but I can't find anything redeeming or positive to state about the opinion or the process that took us here.
> So what’s the point here? Why did SCOTUS accept to hear this? It seems like it was just taken up so that Robertas could fire up culture wars
They accepted the case because they wanted to end race-based affirmative action.
In terms of the dissents, they were completely out of step with the Court’s affirmative action jurisprudence. Going all the way back to Bakke (1978), the Court has never approved of any rationale for race-based affirmative action other than the ‘diversity rationale’. This states that colleges may use affirmative action in order to improve the educational experience by admitting more students of different racial backgrounds. The dissents employed fiery rhetoric but were not shooting for the diversity rationale. As a result, their arguments were destined to fail.
The universities want to have 13% black students because they’re run by the kind of people who prioritize that over other goals. They are now in the position of trying to achieve that while plausibly claiming that they’re not.
While the article claims grades are less predictive than test scores, UTs policy is actually intended to have a similar locally-normalized effect, leveraging the wide variability of high school quality in TX…
like many things, there are some pretty significant unintended consequences though. In my district in Texas, parents would send their kids to the worst high school in the district because it was dramatically easier to be top 4% and get auto-admit to UT that way
Granted UT Austin is really well ranked, that seems like a terrible move for the kids. Like, great, you got in to this really well regarded school, but your preparation to get there may well be considerably worse than nothing at all.
Dartmouth wants to both achieve SES diversity and gets kids who are likely to succeed. If selecting the top of each class in the state gives them the diversity but doesn't give them the success rates, it's a less effective strategy. Their data seems to say that accepting medium-high SAT scores from poorer kids gets them both the diversity and the higher predicted success rates.
>And this is how you again discriminate based on race in a post-Affirmative Action world. The weight they assign to each context is completely arbitrary and tuned to achieve whatever objectives they have.
This would be far more disastrous if spots at colleges were scarce, but they overwhelmingly are not. There are over 15 million undergraduate students in the United States, and we are undergoing a demographic collapse (https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...). In 2 years, the children of the baby bust (2008-2009) will start applying and enrolling in college, and because there are fewer of them, they will have an easier time getting into the college of their choice.
>95% of us do not attend Ivy League schools. Removing any and all affirmative action would help, at best, five thousand students? This is a manufactured issue. No one is denied a college education because of affirmative action. Any time spent arguing against it is wasted.
I just don't see how this is a bad thing. At the end of the day, admissions depts are selecting for potential. A middling test score from a kid with access to all the support they need shows that they've reached their potential. A middling test score from a kid that has received little to no support shows that there is a whole lot more there.
No they aren’t. They’re selling a product to the highest bidder but happen to work in an industry where social and cultural expectations don’t allow them to sell exclusively to highest bidders. Adjusting to those expectations is ever changing as we’re seeing here.
It’s an unfortunate fact that high bidder’s children roughly correlate with high potential (somewhat impolite to point out), so colleges these days can still point to success stories and pretend they did something.
The fact that race and class are so strongly correlated in the United States is a disgrace and a shameful reminder of its history. Giving more opportunities to poor students will of course naturally give more opportunities to Black students, but not because they’re black. It will also give more opportunities to other poor students.
Will processes like this result in families avoiding (or at least not seeking out as much) rigorous high schools? It seems like some families might choose to send their kid to a not-super-rigorous high school — where they can coast in class and learn via outside enrichment — instead of a school with more rigorous academics where they'll be held to a higher bar by colleges.
This would allow students to have a lower-stress life and have an advantage at college admissions — even if they actually learned less academically than they would have at the rigorous high school.
I'm skeptical someone would risk giving their child a significantly worse education in the off chance it might give them a marginally better chance to get into a top university. Regardless high income families moving to low income areas to go to those schools I would assume would be a net benefit for all from a tax perspective. Some of those taxes would presumably go right back to improving the local schools for everyone else.
I wasn't suggesting that families would move, just that they would select lower-intensity schools that they currently have access to. For example, families in Menlo Park can send their kids to high school in Atherton, Redwood City, or San Carlos. If they can get an edge by sending their kid to a school in RWC, where they'll be at the top of the class, and apparently get a boost when colleges weight their SAT, I wouldn't be surprised if some families started choosing this path.
The student who would have been valedictorian but-for such migration would beg to differ!
Of course, this is a dynamic system, and if enough high-scoring kids migrate to less-rigorous schools then the advantage would be diluted. But at the same time, kids who previously would have gone to that less-rigorous school will now be measured against a different standard, since their school would no longer be one that has a very low average SAT. Basically, it's complicated, and there are weird incentives at play.
It's relatively common for similar behavior on the margin; people avoid sending their kids to the super competitive high schools for a combination of competitiveness/mental health/standing-out-to-colleges reasons
Indeed. If the level of instruction between neighboring school districts is the same but one is super competitive and the other is not, I really don't see why you'd decide to buy a house in the the more competitive one. What good does it do? And that's not even taking into account the fact that kids from a weaker school might actually have better chances during admission.
I think the general sense is that being around other high-performing students would be motivating and enjoyable. But if there is a significant tradeoff in terms of admissions, I think some parents will lean in the other direction.
This is nothing new. I went to a very rigorous high school in the late 90s. It was in no way a secret that every top university and even scholarship competition had caps for how many could make it in from our school. The joke amongst students was that the easiest way to get into a top college was for to move to Wyoming and just become valedictorian.
This is a critical part. The problem is not using metrics (like SAT/ACT), the problem is using metrics blindly. That's the thing that always bugs me is when people just go on metrics alone as if they perfectly align with what's being attempted to be measured when metrics are only guides which choices must then be made from through careful evaluation.
At what point can we use genetics to weight scores as well? I’m having a hard time logically justifying class factors (being born poor is not something you can control) but not genetic factors (being born dumb is not something you can control).
A key idea here is that being poor makes you do worse at high school relative to how well you would do at university. Being stupid probably doesn't. So being more generous to poorer students may result in getting an academically stronger set of students overall, whereas being more generous to stupider students won't.
(I don't know how true this "key idea" actually is. I can imagine ways in which poverty might disadvantage people that would persist through their time at university. But it seems plausible prima facie.)
>> Importantly, Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a higher-income community
Since I encountered a similar approach just three years ago in my son's High School application in the Chicago Public School System I can say this leaves a lot to be desired non low-info,e families. Here's a high-level summary of how it works:
1. Chicago is neighborhoods are assigned one of (if memory serves) four levels, which represent socioeconomic levels.
2. With the thought that the economic level is proportional to school quality (this is more true in most places in the US than other countries, since a big chunk of school budget comes from property taxes, so neighborhoods with low taxes get school with lower budgets) scores from the entrance exams for kids from different levels are boosted by different multipliers.
Now, of course, (2) is a travesty of the US but that's another long discussion. The problem with (1) is that the neighborhood to level assignments are not revised each year. So you can be affluent in a district that has gentrified in the past 2-5 years and your kid will get the low-income boost unfairly.
Additionally some neighborhoods are highly bimodal, eg take Lakeview. This is considered a low-income neighborhood but there are many high-income high rises and single family homes within its borders. Alternately, there are many rental condos in our neighborhood which is the highest income level, so these middle income kids get slammed.
Still another problem is families purposefully gaming the system. We had friends who changed their rental condo during their child's 8th year so they can get a lower-info,e address sin their application. This is widely known and done.
Perhaps a better approach would be to use the family's income rather than communities.
Edit: I had more time to research and found the following, in case somebody is interested:
* What I referred to as the four levels are actually called tiers
It's so weird to me that all this data exists, and that's it available and munged enough to be actionable. Do colleges really keep track of this for the tens of thousands of high schools, not only that, but all the income info, the mechanics of student placement for each school district, etc... it just seems so intensely convoluted.
But how do they keep track of all that even so? e.g. school district lines get redrawn all the time. And each school of sufficient size has AP or IB tracks anyway, which basically kills any comparison. And within those, there may even be a further tiering between magnets that select on aptitude etc etc... and what reporting requirements do schools even have? is this mandated by law? the more data you introduce the more it needs to be corrected for; you know like those "10 best cities to ..." listicles.
I don't know. Look at parent's address, correlate with census and income, look at SAT, and be done with it. Solved lol.
these schools aren't new. lots of data to be collected, and likely is collected.
the schools are in most cases public, in which case there is a mandate for many of these statistics. public money pays, so show us what you're getting for it. this is especially the case given poor and underprivileged students, who have been the focus of many studies (and some targeted funding efforts).
the middle school to HS to college pipeline also isn't new at all, and has been tracked for decades.
whats really more shocking to me is not that it's happening, but that more people aren't abusing it aggressively.
>> Third, under test-optional policies, some less-advantaged students withhold test scores even in cases where providing the test score would be a significant positive signal to Admissions. Importantly, Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a higher-income community with higher school-wide test scores. Admissions uses numerous detailed measures of outcomes at the high school and neighborhood levels to account for these known disadvantages. As one example, Admissions computes a measure of how each applicant performs on standardized tests relative to the aggregate score of all test-takers in their high school, using data available from the College Board.