A half-century ago, the University of California began requiring all its applicants to submit SAT scores. Taking such tests is by now so bred in the bone for upper-middle-class Americans that it takes some imaginative exertion to understand what a big step this was. At the time, California had achieved what today seems like a miracle: it had built a vast system of public higher education on the principles of universal access and free tuition. Because the SAT was invented to help prestigious Eastern private universities sort and select candidates, it wasn’t a natural fit with the open, democratic California ethos. But, as the baby-boomer generation reached college age, California universities felt that they could not process the flood of applications without some quantitative help. They also wanted to be able to recruit faculty defectors from the Ivy League, and promising a student body with high SAT scores helped with that.
It was a consequential decision. Because of the persistence of residential segregation, and because pubic high schools are funded mainly through local real-estate taxes, the country (and California in particular) has lots of effectively segregated, under-resourced high schools. All of them produce students who get good grades, but few produce many students who score in the very top percentiles on general-purpose college-admissions tests, such as the SAT and the ACT. That’s because scores correlate closely with parental income, parental education, race, ethnicity, and access to test-prep courses. Heavy emphasis on these tests in admissions drives down the proportion of black and Latino students in universities. According to a study from the Center for Studies in Higher Education, at U.C. Berkeley, if the University of California were to consider only grades, then twelve per cent of the top tenth of its applicants would be African-American and Latino students; if it were to consider only test scores, that number would fall to five per cent.
The standard fix for the penalty that standardized tests impose on minority students has been affirmative action—that is, using minority race as a “positive” factor in admissions decisions, to counteract the way that it can have a “negative” impact on test scores. But affirmative action has proved to be a fragile foundation on which to rest a solution to such a contentious problem. In 1996, a California state initiative to ban affirmative action passed by a wide margin, and, once it took effect, the University of California’s enrollment of African-American and Latino students plummeted. In 2001, the president of the U.C. system announced that he was thinking of dropping the SAT requirement; after a flurry of negotiations between the university and the College Board, which substantially revised the test, he didn’t. Meanwhile, the university found other ways to increase its population of low-income students, and the proportion of minorities also slowly increased, reflecting the changing demographics of the state’s high-school population.
This week, a coalition of civil-rights lawyers representing several groups, including the Compton Unified School District, in Los Angeles, announced in a letter that it will sue the University of California for discrimination unless it drops the use of SATs and ACTs entirely. The coalition isn’t asking the university to make test scores optional, as many colleges across the country have done—it’s asking for an end to the consideration of all standard pre-college tests except for Advanced Placement exams. (The university issued no immediate response to the demand, but noted that a faculty group has been studying the issue since last year. The review was requested by the system’s current president, the former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who recently announced that she will step down in 2020.) If the lawsuit goes forward, it will mirror two on the East Coast—against Harvard and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, which asked that those institutions be legally banned from considering race in admissions—making for a kind of matched set. A federal district court in Boston decided earlier this month that, although Harvard’s admissions process is “not perfect,” it can keep affirmative action. But the case will surely be appealed, and the Supreme Court, for the first time in the forty-five years that it has been hearing college-admissions cases, now seems, with the appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, to have a majority of Justices who are firmly opposed to affirmative action.
American universities’ preferred policy has long been one that seems contradictory to a lot of the outside world: use standardized admissions tests and then dial down their importance in order to achieve a racially diverse student body. For decades—through a long series of lawsuits, hair-splitting Supreme Court decisions, state-initiative campaigns, and experiments with admissions policies meant to achieve racial diversity in ways that are not explicitly racial and quantitative—universities have been able to muddle through, keeping both testing and at least some degree of diversity. The threatened lawsuit in California points the way to a different (and also a simple, clear, and non-muddled) solution: no tests. On the other side is an opposite and stark solution: no consideration of race. It may be coming down to one or the other.
