Context From the College Board -- or a White Flag?

It’s an odd kind of cultural moment, I have to say, when the College Board trends on Twitter, but that’s where we are these days. This month, the worldwide water coolers were set a-chattering about the College Board and its announcement of the Environmental Context Dashboard, a new tool to measure each test taker’s socioeconomic background.

Before we get to the ECD, let’s pause for a second on the actual announcement. As Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment at DePaul University, pointed out, the College Board allowed The Wall Street Journal to reveal the news of the ECD, not its own press release, and left a couple of its researchers to explain on Twitter how a complicated algorithmic index of dozens of data points works. Think about that for one more second. Instead of, you know, running an actual PR campaign or convening, say, at a conference that might include college counselors and admissions officers -- being willing, that is, to field the obvious questions that would emerge from such an announcement -- the College Board slipped the story of its new product behind an expensive paywall that likely excludes the most interested constituent groups: students, community-based organizations and anyone in the world of admissions. Weird flex, I might add, for a company that, in the wake of #AuntBeckyGate, is facing increased scrutiny about how income distorts the results of its most famous product.

We should, to be clear, place this rollout in the echoing hollow of that scandal -- the one where dozens of wealthy parents committed fraud to have their children admitted at prestigious universities and … yada yada yada … now face the possibility of jail time. Although the College Board has been testing its new dashboard for a few years, the company is responding to a marketplace awakened to the advantages of wealth in standardized testing and selective college admissions. As numerous studies have shown, the SAT correlates more with family income than anything else -- be it aptitude, academic merit or future success in college -- and because of the extraordinary racial inequalities in our K-12 schooling system, the test acts to deepen socioeconomic divides rather than “connect students to college success and opportunity,” as the mission statement of the College Board would have it.

In some ways, the racial disparities in SAT scores keep the test linked to its very origins. The test, after all, was designed by a eugenicist and principally conceived of as a way to maintain white supremacy and the economic status quo. That the SAT continues to entrench existing structures of power should not surprise. Remember, too, that the SAT jockeys for market share with the ACT, and a long list of colleges, growing by the day, have seen the light and no longer require standardized tests at all during admissions.

We have, then, a portrait of a “mission-driven” nonprofit organization possibly beset by worry -- worried about its relevance, worried that its mission and its practice fail to align, worried about its future.

Into this minefield of market competition and worry, the College Board has now developed and piloted the ECD, a tool that will help illuminate the socioeconomic background of each test taker. Using publicly available data on the student’s neighborhood and high school, the ECD attempts to calculate the overall disadvantage level of the test taker, accounting for such factors as the neighborhood’s crime rate, housing value and median income, as well as the high school’s AP opportunities and the number of students qualifying for free lunch, among other data points. The dashboard weights the data -- how, we don’t know -- and computes a number from one to 100, a higher score indicating greater disadvantage. That number, which members of the news media have been calling an “adversity score,” will be kept hidden from the student, but college admissions offices will be able to see students’ dashboards and scores when considering their SAT results and personal backgrounds.

Many of the critical responses to the disadvantage index have rightly focused on the lack of transparency and the very nature of quantifying adversity. Students should know what their ECD looks like, and all of us should have a better sense of the weighting formula for determining the “adversity score.” We should also keep in mind that the ECD is not equipped to calculate adversity on an individual level. Students who, for example, may have a disability or an unstable home life will not have those forms of disadvantage registered by the index. Likewise, students of color who face white racism while attending affluent schools or living in tony neighborhoods may not see those experiences reflected in the dashboard.

The score cannot substitute for what students write of themselves in personal essays or what teachers and advisers write in letters of recommendation. It is not a shortcut for the actual practices of holistic admissions, which, when executed in good faith, already work to account for the environment that shaped the applicant. Those practices, in most states, also consider the race of the student, something notably absent from the ECD. Considering the current makeup of the Supreme Court and the legal challenges to race-conscious admissions likely to appear in that court’s pipeline, the ECD offers an alternative way of promoting equity at the gates of selective campuses, should affirmative action be ruled unconstitutional.

Applications to those campuses are often first read by a young, not-so-long-out-of-college-themselves cohort of admissions officers, many of whom turn over and change institutions with frequency. A standardized, uniform method for understanding the socioeconomic backgrounds of the students in their applicant pools has real benefits. Indeed, the researchers behind the ECD have found that more contextual data about applicants increases the likelihood of admission for low-income students -- an unqualified social good in my mind.

Some measure of schadenfreude, I must admit, also accompanies my reaction to the new adversity metrics. From a certain angle, the College Board appears to be hanging a white flag above every SAT testing site in the country, admitting that privilege influences test results far more than any naïve notion of innate intelligence. Perhaps next, colleges will come right out and reveal that selecting for high SAT scores is simply a euphemism for ensuring a student population from predominantly affluent families.

And while we’re getting all the stories we tell ourselves right out on the table, let’s also strike down the dangerous fiction that selective college admissions is a meritocracy, 'cause it ain’t. The legion of ways that money, not merit, influences admissions decisions is too large to ignore, and the gangster moves of celebrities are merely exaggerated versions of ways that everyday wealth vaults affluent students onto the college campus of their choice.

We have to hope the new dashboard helps to smash old myths to pieces and write new narratives of opportunity.