The Inequality Factor

Let’s return to the College Board’s adversity score. 

Besides the fact that reducing anyone’s struggles to a single number strips away more context than it adds, the very creation of this sort of metric is, like the justifications for testing policies, very revealing.

Robert Schaeffer, an executive at FairTest, an organization that advocates for more equity in standardized testing, points out that if the SAT needs this sort of contextual framework to make it valid, then “it’s a concession that it’s not a good test.” 

I’ll take that a step further. 

The SAT is spitting out data that practically screams about how inequitable the education system is in this country. The scoring disparities revealed in the raw data are stark. Yet the exam continues to be administered, and admissions officers keep making their selections. The SAT may now be more accessible, more mindful of inequalities, more “with the times” than it was in years past. But attempts to keep the test relevant—including publications from the College Board alleging that grade inflation heightens socioeconomic and racial inequalities—are only a way to justify a certain metric and broader system for evaluating students for college, despite that metric and the results of that system clearly showing something is deeply wrong with the entire process. 

The adversity score’s very creation was essentially the College Board admitting that the U.S. is saturated with inequality, so much so that test scores must be accompanied by extra context because students start on such an uneven playing field—and still playing its role in a system of higher education that magnifies and even enables this inequality. 

Testing companies and colleges won’t just close their doors one day, spurred by a righteous fight against unfairness. As the admissions system keeps churning through students, we can’t just make it grind to a halt. But we should recognize that it is not completely fair and that attempts to make it seem that way are too often justification for a lack of real reform.

The trouble is creating a fairer admissions system when some students just have a leg up on others by virtue of their background.

Jiayang Fan writes for The New Yorker: “At the heart of every attempt to reform higher education in America is the question of how to equitably distribute opportunities in an inherently unequal world.”

Inequality in higher education in the U.S. runs incredibly deep. Black and Hispanic students have lost ground in terms of representation in the U.S.’s top colleges over the past 35 years. Black students make up 15 percent of college-age Americans but 9 percent of freshmen at Ivy League schools. Enrollment in the 468 best-funded and most selective four-year colleges is 75 percent white, while in the 3,250 lowest-funded community and four-year colleges it is 43 percent Black and Hispanic.

An analysis from The New York Times reveals the astounding wealth inequality at top colleges; Brown University’s student body has a median parental income of $204,200, which is in the 90th percentile for U.S. households. Children whose parents are in the top one percent of income distribution are seventy-seven times more likely to attend an Ivy League school than those whose parents are in the bottom 20 percent. 

Researchers are still arguing about which part of the college admissions process is most inequitable. But, when seeing the low proportion of underrepresented minority students enrolled in top colleges—and any colleges—it is not radical to say that all parts of the admissions process are unequal, that no aspect is purely meritocratic.

One study even found that the content and style of students’ application essays were more strongly associated with household income than was SAT score. 

“In short, our work indicates that merely eliminating SAT scores from consideration in no way eliminates the signature of class from application materials,” concluded the study’s authors.

The advantages accrued by wealthy, upper middle class, and even some middle class families add up far before the college admissions process officially begins. It’s not just hiring SAT tutors or private college advisors. It’s years of affluence.

Families with the means to do so buy houses in the neighborhoods with the best schools; in 2010, in neighborhoods in the country’s largest metros, income segregation was twice as high among families with children living at home as among households without them. Parents who have enough money can be picky with where they want to raise their children to maximize their chances of success later in life.

Upper, upper middle, and middle class parents also invest more in their children’s extracurricular activities and spend more time reading to their children than working class parents. Parents with means “see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation,” according to Annette Lareau, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. They closely supervise their children’s activities and teach them to advocate for themselves in the presence of authority figures, while working class parents believe their children will naturally thrive and give them greater independence. In 2016, parents from the top 20 percent of the income distribution spent about $8,600 per year on enrichment activities for their children, while families in the bottom 20 percent spent $1,700.

As Masha Gessen writes for The New Yorker, “For the socially and economically hopeful…raising a child in America is an eighteen-year process of investing in the college-admissions system.”

One study from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce found that talented people from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to not do as well as those with little talent from advantaged backgrounds. A kindergarten student in the bottom 25 percent of socioeconomic status with test scores in the top 25 percent has a 31 percent chance of earning a college education, while their peer in the top 25 percent of socioeconomic status with test scores in the bottom 25 percent has a 71 percent chance. The results translate to future earnings as well. Students in the lowest-income families are nine times less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than students from the highest-income families. And extensive research has shown that poverty and racism can negatively impact brain development.

As Anthony P. Carnevale, lead author of the Georgetown CEW report, bluntly puts it, “To succeed in America, it’s better to be born rich than smart.”

Access to higher education is not unequal just because of the relatively few families who can pay $300 per hour for a standardized testing tutor, or because legacy admissions take up a certain number of spots at Yale. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to be funneled into less prestigious colleges with less funding and are more likely to forego college altogether. 

Inequality exists on a wide scale. More affluent kids are always going to have a leg up on less affluent ones. I implicate myself in this: Would my SAT score, or my application essays, or my extracurricular activities have been the same if I were born to a less well-off family and attended a worse school? Of course not. It is impossible to examine a student and pull out some pure quality that is their merit, unaffected by their background and external circumstances. 

If colleges admitted this, then their admissions letters would hold a lot less weight, which threatens their relevance. So they continue to, while perhaps not outwardly claim, at least not push back too hard on the notion that they act as all-knowing oracles.

Socioeconomic and racial inequality cannot be wiped from the admissions process by simply discounting test scores. Nor can it be adjusted for by eliminating other factors. Every single aspect of a student’s college application is stamped with their background, their advantages and disadvantages. Making the admissions process completely fair is impossible. You would have to make U.S. society completely equal, make families all start out in the same place. The changes happening right now, though arguably marginally helpful, are just surface-level fixes—tissue paper over ravines.