The SAT looms large in the minds of college applicants, who know that their scores could greatly determine their odds of admission to high-profile colleges. But what if the big test were an even bigger test? What would happen if the nation’s most-selective institutions ditched their holistic evaluations and considered nothing but test scores?
Those campuses would end up enrolling even more white, affluent students, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. In a new report, “SAT-Only Admission: How Would It Change College Campuses?,” researchers there raise important questions about the fairness of the admissions system and the role of tests within it.
As a “thought experiment” the researchers examined what the effects would be if the selection process relied on a single variable — standardized-test scores.
What they found is that it would make the top 200 institutions less racially diverse. The share of white students would increase to 75 percent from 66 percent; the combined share of black and Latino students would fall to 11 percent from 19 percent; and the share of Asian-American students would fall to 10 percent from 11 percent.
A test-only policy would also make those colleges “even more aristocratic,” the researchers found. The share of students in the top socioeconomic quartile — families with college-age children and a median annual income of at least $122,000 — would rise to 63 percent from 60 percent.
The findings were the result of an exercise that used data on all domestic students from the high-school graduating class of 2013 who had reported ACT or SAT scores. The researchers sorted students by test score and “admitted” them on the basis of that metric alone until they had filled 300,000 seats at the 200 colleges. Not one applicant with an SAT score below 1250 got a spot.
When the researchers looked at the number of applicants who did, in fact, enroll at those colleges, they found that 53 percent had scored below 1250. More than half of those students — 53 percent — came from the top socioeconomic quartile.
“Lower-scoring affluent students,” the report said, “are disproportionately taking seats that might have otherwise gone to students with higher test scores.” Two-thirds (66 percent) of those affluent students with scores below 1250 were white.
The researchers also found that relatively few sub-1250 students were from groups that are typically thought to benefit from race-conscious admissions policies: Twenty-seven percent were black or Hispanic, 8 percent were Asian-American, and 57 percent were white.
The experiment was meant to start a conversation, said Jeff Strohl, the center’s director of research and a co-author of the report. One takeaway: “The students colleges are taking a score-based risk on tend to be affluent,” he said.
In other words, by imagining a different admissions system, the researchers have underscored the inequities in the existing one.
Eric Hoover writes about the challenges of getting to, and through, college. Follow him on Twitter @erichoov, or email him, at eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
