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And college admissions offices should reveal the true secret sauce (not test scores) for getting in.
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We disagree in principle about affirmative action. One of us, a frequent fundraiser for Democratic candidates, believes that it’s better for colleges to have a diverse student body that more faithfully reflects the nation; and that we need to counterbalance the impact of poverty on education and opportunity, which often means giving special consideration to minority students. The other, a former Reagan staffer, believes consideration of race is intrinsically unfair and hinders race relations.
But we agree that race-based affirmative action hasn’t worked. Because of how it has played out in practical terms, it’s time for colleges to shift the policy from being based on race to income.
Affirmative action’s original intent was to incorporate more minority students, specifically blacks and Hispanics, into elite universities. But blacks and Hispanics have actually lost ground in the admissions race over the past 25 years, as recently reported by the New York Times . And while the original policy was intended to help minorities, Asian-American students feel they are taking the biggest hit. As a result, many have filed lawsuits against Ivy League schools such as Harvard, claiming that to gain admission, Asian-American students, on average, have to score 140 points higher on the SAT than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students, and 450 points higher than African-American students.
In tandem with shifting the basis for affirmative action, colleges need to be clearer about what qualifies students for admission. Many people believe that selective college admissions is, or should be, purely based on academic success. But the work of admissions officers is more complicated than finding the highest test scores. It’s more like casting a movie. They want to put together an incoming freshman class that has aspiring journalists for the school newspaper, great athletes for all the teams, debaters, musicians, actors, dancers, legacies, and development prospects.
Jack DeGioia, the president of Georgetown, told us that his school has to fill more than 140 separate “buckets,” reflecting the diversity of interests and backgrounds that will create a vibrant community. Of 19,500 Georgetown applicants last year, about half were academically qualified—that is, they scored over the threshold of test scores and grades to put them into the qualified pool to fill those buckets.
Standardized tests help admissions officers narrow their pools; they are still the most often used yardstick colleges have to compare applicants. But those tests are also very responsive to focused preparation. A new survey commissioned by Noodle found that Asian-American families spent more than twice as much money on test prep as any other group. This explains in part why Asian-American kids do so well on the exams. It’s not surprising that they are disappointed when their higher scores don’t result in admission to elite schools.
But the counterintuitive admissions secret—based on hundreds of interviews we’ve conducted with college admissions directors, deans and presidents over 25 years—is that an additional 10 or 20 points on the SAT above the (secret) threshold doesn’t improve one’s chances of getting in. That’s because admissions officers know that standardized tests are best at measuring how hard someone prepares for the test. They are less useful at predicting whether an applicant will be an academic star in college. Consequently, admissions officers place much more weight on the rigor of academic courses and teacher recommendations to help identify the most promising students.
The application essay is another tool for admissions officers, which they use to identify applicants who are generous, considerate and thoughtful—and to weed out those who obviously are not. Then they look for evidence of long-term commitments to extracurricular interests, volunteer activities and even after-school and summer jobs, to fill those buckets and leaven the college community.
One way schools could make admissions less “unfair” and a bit less stressful is to be more transparent about their scoring rubrics—the combination of GPA, SAT and course selection that get an applicant into the “possible” pile. Colleges could say: “To be a serious candidate for admission, you need a 3.2 GPA and 1200 SAT scores. Of course, if you are a potential All-American athlete, an all-state flutist, or have a family income under $35,000, we’ll probably make allowances. But importantly, once you’ve met that threshold, we really do not care if your grades or SAT scores are higher. At that stage, we’re looking for interesting, nice kids with a passion.”
In the 2003 pivotal decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that colleges should not need race-conscious decision policies in 25 years; that was 14 years ago.
Now is the time to make the switch from a “minority” bucket to a “grit” bucket—for applicants of any race who’ve risen above economic adversity—and to be transparent about this change. Whether on the left or right, fair people cannot begrudge a boost in the admissions process for a young person who overcomes poverty and inferior local schools.
Rather than continue to pretend that college admissions is one giant academic meritocracy, let’s be more candid about the complex and idiosyncratic needs of each school. Let’s explicitly reward students who have overcome disadvantaged financial beginnings, but not give one race an advantage over another. This is where we begin to create better outcomes and build a fairer, healthier system.
Mr. Katzman is CEO of Noodle and founder of the Princeton Review and 2U. Mr. Cohen is an attorney and a co-author of “Getting In! The Zinch Guide to College Admissions & Financial Aid in the Digital Age.”
