More from the Higher Ed Swamp

Last week, The College Board announced that it plans to assign an “adversity score” to its standardized test scoring, using 15 factors, including crime rate, poverty levels and whether or not the individual was raised in a single parent household.  But unlike the verbal and math scores, the “adversity score” will not be available to student or parents but will only be available to schools.  This bit of social engineering has created a firestorm of controversy in a sector already rocked by the college admissions scandal, the abuse scandals at MSU and USC and the student debt crisis.

I thought the whole point of “standardized” tests was, well, to come up with a “standardized” predictor and indicator of academic achievement.  But clearly academic achievement is no longer a primary mission of much of higher education.   “Diversity” and “inclusiveness” count more.

After I got over my initial visceral revulsion to the announcement by The College Board, I decided that mostly what the “adversity score” does is quantify what institutions have already been doing informally for a long time anyway.  Perhaps the upside is that the “adversity score” attempts to quantify factors that admissions offices have previously done by guesswork without any quantitative data behind it.

 What don’t I like most about the "adversity score"?

Nontransparency

First of all, the scores are completely opaque to students.  They will be transmitted to colleges, but students cannot see them.   Board scores are like income.  There is no need to share them publicly but keeping the “adversity score” from students themselves is obnoxious, especially at a time when some schools are moving away from board score requirements.   Especially if the “adversity scores” are based in data as The College Board suggests, there is no defensible reason to shroud these scores in secrecy. 

What, exactly, are we handicapping?

The factors that go into the mix are very narrow.  How do you know what “adversity” any individual has experienced?  What about a person from a lower class but two person working family from the south side of Chicago that happens to live in a poor neighborhood?  Is that person facing more adversity than the kid from Winnetka that comes home to a drunk mother every night? What about a kid that has been marginalized in high school because of a speech impediment?  I knew one family in a leafy suburb where one of the three children suffered from a severe mental illness that was very disruptive to family life?  How do those circumstances figure into this measure?  There are a myriad of factors that may limit academic qualifications.  Economic adversity is simply one dimension of possible adversity. 

Solving the wrong problem.

As with most social engineering attempts, the “adversity score” solves the wrong problem.   The problem is that too few African Americans and other minorities do not qualify for admission into top level schools and once they get there their graduation rates are low.

The real problem is complicated and lies primarily in our union infested K-12 public school system, in family structure in minority communities which contributes to low expectations, and in part in the violence that in endemic in some of these areas.   The College Board is attacking the wrong problem.  The problem is NOT that the bar is too high.  The problem is that we need more creative and innovative ways to intervene at a much earlier time in the cycle (think restructuring K-12, and strengthening junior colleges and HSCUs).

Worse, the “adversity score” will actually enable our substandard K-12 system to continue to do what it has been doing. Failing miserably.

One friend of mine whose father was career military said to me that despite the fact that he was professional and had a graduate degree, his actual lifestyle was no better than his parents and may be work.  I replied, “that’s because higher education and the State have conspired to scrape off the excess earnings.”  A middle income or upper middle income person does not get much, if any, in financial aid.  With higher education inflation far outpacing inflation, and increasing taxes, higher education (sometimes in consort with government) have stripped away any incremental increase in wealth from the middle class.   And now children of middle income but single earner parents will get disadvantaged even more, not because of their individual characteristics, but because they happen to belong to a certain class.

Rather than being a bridge to advancement, higher education is now weighing down the middle class, stripping them of wealth and robbing them of an ever increasing proportion of their future earnings with unsustainable debt.

Venture capitalist Peter Theil recently skewered higher education and I think hit it right on:

“The analogy that I’ve often used for universities is that they are as corrupt today as the Catholic Church was 500 years ago on the eve of the Protestant Reformation.  It’s the same sort of stuff that we are being told.  You have the priestly professorial that is very sinecured.  You have runaway tuitions that are like the indulgences.  There is a salvation story where if you get a degree from Harvard, you’ll end up in a good place.  If you don’t get a college degree you will end up in a very bad place.  This is the Atheist Church.  What I am arguing for is a 2^nd Reformation and it is not to replace it with some unitary alternative system.  I think it will be a whole range of different things.”

The “adversity score” will do little to improve the lot of minorities.  It will unnecessarily harm middle class kids.  While I’m not as hysterical about it as many conservatives, the actual effect will be to enable our broken education system to continue on its dismal path.

I’m willing to bet that paying off the student loans of Morehouse College ’19 graduates by billionaire Robert Smith will do more for young minorities starting out in life than any relative advantage conveyed by an “adversity score.”