The Gold Standard For Admission To College: White Boys From Well-To-Do Families

One of the contentious issues that has developed since the sixties (no surprise there) is who gets into college, especially the really “good colleges” and who does not. The contentiousness is due in no small way to the significant and increasing gap in income between those who go to such schools and those who do not. The roots of this issue go deep into American history, indeed, down to the seventeenth century at least. But for our immediate analysis, we begin with America following the First World War.

The country had emerged from the war victorious and rich, but far more diverse than at any other time in its brief history. The more progressive members of the liberal Episcopal ruling class believed it was time for a breath of fresh air. Perhaps, these liberal progressives reasoned, it was time for the elite Ivy League schools to draw their applicants from a pool wider and deeper than the even more elite and prestigious preparatory schools scattered throughout the eastern seaboard. How could one argue against the proposition that, in a democratic society, the leaders who would emerge from the Ivy League schools should be more representative of the nation they would lead? Model public schools, such as the Boston Latin School, were available to copy, but standards to evaluate applicants were neither well defined nor well dispersed as they are today.

And like the good liberal progressives that they were, they concluded that what was needed was a “scientific” and hence objective test, available to all, that would test an applicant’s aptitude for rigorous academic work. It would stand on a solid platform of statistics, and assumed that aptitude would be normally distributed in the shape of the famous “bell curve”. Two tests, one verbal and one quantitative, would be combined for a total score. The mean score for each test would be set at 500 with a standard deviation of 100. The total score would range between 400 to 1,600 with the median set at 1,000. And although the creators denied this was an IQ test, the median score was set to equal 115 on an IQ test. This meant that an applicant achieving a total score of 1,000 would have an IQ in the top sixteen per cent of the population. The test was given a name, the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT, and by 1947 it was ready to go.

In the intervening sixty years, seemingly countless millions of ambitious, and in some cases not so ambitious, students have taken The Test. It has been critiqued, criticized, condemned. In response the Educational Testing Service, which developed and administers the test, has reworked, revised, renamed, re-centered it, and much more. And yet, despite the howls of protest, the SAT remains standing. Indeed for the testing year of 2008, over 1,500,000 applicants took it because almost all colleges rely on the SAT score, to some extent, in evaluating applicants for admission. Why? Because it works, for the most part.

What then is the controversy all about you ask? It’s simple really: some people do better than others on the SAT. But you ask isn’t that the point of any test? And on top of that, shouldn’t one expect the same people who did well the first time to do well over and over, while the same people who did poorly the first time to do poorly over and over? Not when you’ve got commies running the universities. Let me explain.

In the mind of a commie it’s acceptable for scores of individuals to be all over the map, but not scores of groups. What? Isn’t a group just about the most arbitrary classification in the world? Is there really any limit to the number of groups or the membership in any respective group? Probably not. But in the mind of a commie, some groups are more equal than others. You see commies believe some groups have been the target of “invidious”” and “institutional” discrimination, and hence the members of these groups are not responsible for their low test scores. Instead they are VICTIMS of an unjust system that perpetuates their oppression under the guise of objectivity. But who picks the “oppressed” groups and chooses their membership? (Remember, the number of groups and their members are constructively infinite.) Why, the commies, of course. I know this sounds absolutely daffy, but let’s look at some group test scores anyway. Or in our case, the recently released 2008 SAT scores. Perhaps there is something to be learned here.

According to the College Board, 1,518,859 applicants took the SAT for the reporting year 2008. The mean critical reasoning (verbal) score was 502, and the mean mathematics (quantitative) score was 515. These scores represent what can only be described as a pathetic performance, but before we bewail the fate of the Republic let’s take a closer look using College Board numbers.

If universities were to admit students based solely on mathematics scores of 550 or higher here is what they would get: 329,425 males and 277,153 females for a total of 606,578 students. This means America could have 151 universities with a freshman class of about 4,000 students, 54% male, with an average math SAT score of a little over 600. 151 good schools. But these students account only for about 40% of those who took the SAT. In other words 60% of the applicants were wasting their time and money because they’re not college material. But here is the zinger. About 210,110 of these students would be white males. That would represent about 35% of the student body. And by the way most of the students would come from families with an income of at least $80,000 a year. One final point: the student body would be about 70% white.

What does this bode for the future of the Republic? Topics for another time.