Education

For College Admissions, Is “Adversity” Living Near Poor People?


College admissions officials seek a rounded view of students applicants that considers not just GPAs and test scores, but student’s backgrounds and struggles. But admissions officials’ task has only grown more difficult as the Common Application has multiplied the number of students they must assess. The College Board’s “Environmental Context Dashboard” seems like an easy shortcut: appended to each student’s SAT results, the Dashboard provides information on the school and neighborhood quality of each applicant. In theory, colleges can use the Dashboard to give an admissions edge to applicants who scored well on the SAT despite attending high school under difficult conditions. In practice, these statistics will favor privileged children in poor districts while penalizing lower-income students attending higher income schools.

The College Board’s Environmental Context Dashboard measures factors ranging from the percentage of children at a school receiving free lunches to the number of Advanced Placement courses the school offers, along with community characteristics such as family incomes, the share of single-parent households and the local crime rate. The Dashboard won’t directly affect students’ SAT scores, but colleges can use the school and neighborhood quality ratings as a factor in weighing applicants against each other. But my own family’s experience shows how these background factors could benefit privileged students and penalize students who have legitimately struggled.

The Wall Street Journal recently contracted with the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce to weight SAT scores using the College Board’s school and neighborhood environment ratings, to provide context on how much the Dashboard’s results might matter.

Consider how these environmental factors might affect my son when he applies for college. Until several years ago, my wife and I lived with our young son in Arlington, Virginia, a prosperous Washington, D.C. suburb. Our Arlington zip code has a median household income of $106,830 and a median home sales price of $748,000. While not without its challenges, Arlington is an economically-rising area that recently attracted Amazon’s second headquarters. In a 2014 New York Times analysis of Census Bureau data, only 4 percent of prime age men in our Arlington neighborhood were not working.

But my family chose to move to Klamath Falls, Oregon, a small rural city in which my wife grew up. Klamath Falls, like much of rural America, faces steep challenges of job loss, broken families and drug addiction, all of which hobble students’ efforts to succeed. Klamath Falls has a median household income of $33,604 and a median home price of $200,000. The 2014 New York Times analysis found that 54 percent of prime-age males in Klamath Falls were not working. Arlington and Klamath Falls are very different places. The College Board’s Environmental Context Dashboard is designed to capture those differences.

And yet in moving from a well-off suburb to a lower-income rural area, my son’s own background hasn’t changed a bit. He has the same parents with the same income. He’s simply gone from being a middle-class child in a well-off neighborhood to one of the most privileged children in a lower-income area. And the SAT adversity index would be the best thing that could happen to his chances of gaining admission to a top college.

Let’s assume my son receives a combined SAT score of 1340, which would place him at the 90th percentile of students taking the test. This score would be typical for colleges such as Emory University or Boston College – high-quality institutions, but not in the very top tier of competitiveness for admission.

But now consider how the Environmental Context Dashboard might factor in. Were my family still living in Arlington, VA, the Journal’s analysis indicates that the Collage Board’s adversity index would add about 11 points to my son’s SAT score.

But were my son to receive that same 1340 SAT score in Klamath Falls, Oregon, the Journal finds that the College Board’s adversity index would effectively add 120 points to his score, into striking distance of the truly elite U.S colleges and universities.

And that’s not because my son suffered any adversity. It’s because of his proximity to adversity, of attending school with underprivileged children, not actually being one of them. In the same way, a low-income family that worked hard to live in a high-quality school district would find its children penalized due to their statistical affluence. Certainly high-income households could game the system by moving their child to a low-income school, if just for year while he took the SAT exam. But more broadly, the use of background factors like school and neighborhood quality will tend to benefit the most privileged children in low-income areas while penalizing the poorest children in high-income area.

The problem is that, while giving the appearance of looking at the whole child, the College Board’s Environmental Context Dashboard has no information on the actual student applying for college. That’s expensive to gather. Instead, the Board accesses publicly-available information on an applicants’ school or neighborhood and assumes that all kids living there face the same challenges.  

That makes it cheap. But it doesn’t make it accurate.



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