Social and Economic Background is now part of the new college SAT

“Knowledge is good.” The famous quote on the statue of Emil Faber, founder of the fictitious Faber College in the film, Animal House. While the Greek system is not under the microscope at the moment, admission to colleges and universities is front and center.

The latest college admissions scam by the elite and Hollywood left have again opened the door for admissions offices to green-light the new Orwellian four-feet good class of students, low-income, first-generation college attendees.

How about that, I managed to segue in both Animal House and Animal Farm. I don’t think Christopher Hitchens could have done that.

On to more important things. High school admissions counselors and private college recruitment companies have been on to this changing demographic for the lasts five years or so. Case in point. James Conroy, director of college counseling at New Trier High School, which serves several affluent and mostly white communities north of Chicago, exudes, “My emails are inundated with admissions officers who want to talk to our diversity kids.”

So what does this new socio-economic SAT score look like?

On a side note, the lawsuit against Harvard University by a party of Asian-Americans alleging discrimination is still ongoing. The SAT is still taken with pencil and paper, but continues to be scammed across America, as well as in Asia and the Middle East, where both the ACT and SAT exams have experienced security breaches.

The above graphic from the College Board is the current bell curve of SAT scores distributed by race. A perfect score is 1600. Fifty colleges used the score last year as part of a beta test. The College Board plans to expand it to 150 institutions this fall, and then use it broadly the following year.

Social engineering has been attempted to manipulate the system in the past. Affirmative action was used so that if one checked the correct box, they would be favored over the one who didn’t, and Ebonics was invented in the 1970’s and regarded as one reason why blacks scored lower on the SAT verbal section. What was social science is now statistical, and quantifiably measurable by, among others, the College Board. It looks something like this.

The lovely thing about the Adversity Index is that in a society that now values transparency, no one will get to see this score, not even the student, only the admissions departments at colleges and universities.

The virulent rhetoric that comes out of academia today will only get worse. College hasn’t been about educating students and preparing them for the workplace for a long time. It no longer is a place where you are allowed in for merit alone. It is watered down such that no one really knows why someone is actually admitted or rejected to schools. It is all about diversity, and the current favorite class is the first generation, low-income class. Absolutely nothing wrong with this, by the way.

However, great colleges and universities need to decide whether they want to teach the smartest kids or the most diverse kids. Anecdotally, student diversity never really leaves the admissions office. If you stroll down the walkways of any Ivy League institution, you will see girls with girls, blacks with blacks, Chinese with Chinese, in generalities. Fraternities and sororities in many cases are made up predominately by one diverse group or another. Here is a way to ease the burdened college admissions system.

According to the Migrant Policy Institute, there were some 45 million immigrants living in the United States in 2017. Thus, America alone should be a diverse enough nation, as those 45 million people represent the hundreds of nations around the world. Let colleges and universities select from our own diverse students, instead of those students who are not American.

Editor’s note: Phrases like “institutional bias” and “the soft bigotry of low expectations” pop into my head reading about this kind of misguided policy. Social justice warriors never understand the damage they do.