While above-average scores on college entrance exams may predict better academic performance and graduation rates in college, relying on the scores in admission decisions will “severely reduce” the number of minority and low-income students on campus.
That is the key finding from a new study released Monday, titled “Efficacy vs. Equity: What Happens When States Tinker with College Admissions in a Race-Blind Era?”
The study is meant to illuminate the challenges associated ensuring diversity on campus by means of supposedly “objective” criteria such as SAT or ACT scores.
Those challenges come into play in the era ushered in by the 2014 Fisher v. University of Texas case, which holds that public universities must show there are no “workable solutions” not based on race before they resort to race-based admissions strategies to bring about diversity.
To demonstrate the difficulty of using criteria that is supposedly race-blind, the researchers — UT Austin professors Sandra Black and Jane Arnold Lincove and Texas A&M University professor Kalena Cortes — show what the impact would be if college entrance exam scores and other criteria, such as the number of college prep courses taken and high school exit exam scores, were applied in Texas, where the top 10 percent of students in all high schools are automatically admitted to the public university of their choice.
They found that SAT or ACT scores are “significant predictors” for the top 10 percent of high school graduates and can boost the average GPA by 6.3 percent and increase the four-year graduation rates by 5.9 points.
“However, adding these new admission criteria also severely reduces both minority and low-income representation in our analysis,” the study states.
