May 5th, 2008 Posted in Borrowing Good Ideas from the Privates | 1 Comment »
“The Chronicle of Higher Education”
“One after another at this time of year, elite colleges trumpet the outstanding SAT scores of the applicants they have admitted. The question often raised by such announcements is just how much those scores matter.
“Two recent studies conclude that they matter quite a lot. The researchers assert that selective colleges give excessive weight to SAT scores for the sake of bolstering their college-guide rankings and, in doing so, greatly complicate their pursuit of diversity.
“The studies give advocates for minority students cause for both hope and fear at a time when highly selective colleges are rejecting more applicants than ever, and race-conscious admissions policies are coming under renewed attack in the courts and the political arena.
“The reports’ authors argue that selective colleges do not necessarily have to consider applicants’ ethnicity and race to promote diversity. Rather, colleges could increase their enrollments of minority and low-income students simply by giving more weight to admissions criteria other than standardized-test scores.
“At the same time, however, the studies suggest that powerful market forces have selective colleges under pressure to give even more weight to standardized admissions tests, hurting the prospects of low-income and minority applicants, who are less likely to post high scores.
“One of the reports, to be published next month in the book Realizing Bakke’s Legacy: Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity, and Access to Higher Education, charts sharp increases over the past few decades in the share of slots at 30 highly ranked colleges going to students with high SAT scores (see table). While acknowledging that the trend is probably driven by a combination of forces-including substantial long-term growth in the number of students taking the SAT-it says the rise in the number of high scorers at many selective colleges is too steep to have taken place without at least some increase in the weight given to test scores.
“The other study, summarized in the American Sociological Review late last year, likewise found that high scorers’ share of selective-college enrollments has risen largely because of the institutions’ “attempts to climb the pecking order of various college ranking systems.” Based on statistical simulations of the impact of various changes in admissions policy, the study’s authors conclude that selective colleges could achieve significant racial and ethnic diversity in their enrollments without race-conscious admissions policies if they would put more weight on factors such as class rank.
“Many experts on college admissions say they doubt that selective colleges will be relying less on standardized tests anytime soon. Even if they did, the share of their entering classes with high scores might continue to rise as a result of trends beyond the colleges’ control, such as increases in the overall number of students taking the tests, some of whom would probably add to the ranks of those performing well.
The desire of many families to send their children to the most prestigious institutions they can get into also leads to high-scoring students’ becoming more concentrated at colleges at the top of the rankings.”
Submitted by David Fairris