Whoops! It turns out that, far from being a more “holistic” measure that rewards the well-rounded, college admissions essays correlate more strong

On Essays and SATs: Some Students are Just More Prepared Than Others

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2021-06-15 20:30:06

Whoops! It turns out that, far from being a more “holistic” measure that rewards the well-rounded, college admissions essays correlate more strongly with family income than SATs do. (This is in part a function of the fact that, found to be .25 in the largest sample I am aware of, the correlation between SAT scores and family income is vastly overstated by liberals.) The inevitable result will simply to be to kick the can further; “we need even more holistic criteria than before!” But it might be more useful to have a hard conversation.

My piece on why holistic criteria actually hurts marginalized students has been lost to the inevitable linkrot of time (edit: here!), but the point’s not particularly hard to grasp. The book Measuring Success amounts to a book-length refutation of all of the progressive myths about the SAT, and anyway, there is absolutely no reason to believe that holistic admissions aren’t subject to capture by the moneyed. Since test prep doesn’t work, family money can’t fix low SAT or ACT scores, whereas money can absolutely get a privileged teen into a summer program building houses for low-income families in the Andes (intersectional as well as holistic!), fencing lessons (decent at rare sport > great at common sport, unless it’s football or basketball), and a writing workshop (obsessive about one interest rather than casual about several, in today’s admissions game).

And since holistic criteria are so vague, you can’t do a simple correlation to see the impact of SES, like you can with the SAT and ACT. We know there is some relationship between test scores and family income precisely because those tests are quantitatively transparent; we can never have that with the black box of holistic admissions. Cynics might suggest that affluent white liberals are such strong proponents of holistic admissions precisely because there is less transparency, as less transparency in the system inevitably benefits the moneyed. There is no system of reward for academic achievement that the wealthy can’t game, but the assumption that holistic criteria favors diverse candidates while hard numbers favor well-off students remains totally unproven. It’s just liberal theology.