OPINION:
Meritocracy is dying.
As recently reported, Columbia University just became the first Ivy League school to permanently drop the SAT or ACT requirement for undergraduate admissions. It won’t be the last. This will be an increasing trend and may soon be the norm at both public and private universities. The stated reasons are noble but are actually designed to hide their true intentions.
Ostensibly, removing standardized testing for college admissions is designed to make the process fairer, and to allow more opportunities for less “privileged” students and historically marginalized groups to attend college. Theoretically, this should help students from low-income backgrounds, first-generation college students, and students of color.
As someone who attended Columbia representing two of these groups, I can tell you that this will not help students like me who want to excel in an educational and social environment that is new to them. I know what it’s like to come from a low-income community into an elite educational environment and to be a mixed-race student coming from a home where no one on the Black side of my family had attended college and who were so poor that my mom didn’t have hot water in her house growing up.
As a child, I missed out on many of the opportunities my classmates at Columbia had, from simply having the resources of a great private school at my disposal to not being able to participate in resume-building extracurricular activities because we could not afford it.
While the goal of opening up opportunities for smart young people is admirable, the real reason Columbia is abolishing testing requirements is that, in all likelihood, the Supreme Court is about to abolish the constitutional standing of affirmative action. Because this is a fundamental tenet of educational dogma for the administrators who run Columbia and most other schools, they are looking for ways to circumvent this expected ruling.
The way around it is actually quite clever: Develop a new “holistic” approach to college admissions with less transparent metrics, relying more on the personal judgment and preference of the admissions committees. In law school, we called that “squishy.” Now outsiders will be less able to prove a pattern of bias by admissions committees and less able to compare the academic qualifications of demographic groups within their student body. The result is that they’ll still be able to offer admissions based on a completely opaque and standardless view of “righting historical wrongs,” but without calling it “affirmative action.”
It’s also notable that Columbia’s current president, Lee Bollinger, is the named defendant in the case that Students for Fair Admissions is seeking to overturn. Grutter v. Bollinger has controlled the constitutional landscape on affirmative action for 20 years and is the precedent that allows race-conscious admissions practices in U.S. colleges and universities. As this decision approaches its 20th anniversary in June, just seven days before Mr. Bollinger steps down from his 21-year tenure as president, his personal legacy is on the line and is itself about to be overturned. It’s probably not a coincidence that the first school to find a workaround to continue de facto affirmative action once the Supreme Court finds it unconstitutional is run by the man who established the current regime in the first place.
This “shadow affirmative action” is not just a blow to meritocracy in general; it is actually a huge disservice to the sort of first-generation and low-income kids these policies are supposedly designed to help. The reality is the exact opposite of what they would have you believe: Standardized testing is a way to help disadvantaged students stand out from their more advantaged peers.
When looking at a student application “holistically,” an admissions committee can take note of the median income in a student’s ZIP code, whether they attended public or private school, and other factors in their personal essay to note whether they are an exceptional student in their community and considering their background, or an average student considering educational, community and financial advantages. A standardized test is precisely how a student can demonstrate intelligence and potential despite a difficult background.
Don’t believe me? Ask me or any of my Ivy League friends who grew up in trailer parks, inner cities, or poor small towns how much standardized tests helped us prove our merit to prestigious schools. As my best friend at Columbia said when I got my LSAT score, “Think of all the rich kids who couldn’t score what you did.” To this day, that is one of the proudest moments of my life. Many others besides me have noted how valuable standardized tests were to their education and opportunities.
Conservatives are getting ready to celebrate the end of the affirmative action era. But don’t break out the Champagne yet, because liberals have already found a way around it, and will soon be instituting this policy nationwide. It may start at the Ivies, but it will end up in every state college and university system. The battle for merit in schools has not ended, and the war has not been won. All that has happened is that a new era has opened up a new chapter of the same old fight, and we’d better get ready.
• Shane Hachey attended Columbia University when Lee Bollinger first became president, and when Grutter v. Bolliner was being decided by the Supreme Court.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.