Building a real meritocracy

Our admissions policies are classist.

We commonly assume that cost is the principle obstacle preventing qualified applicants from low-income families from attending top American colleges. But the supposedly meritocratic criteria by which admissions offices evaluate applicants deserve greater scrutiny.

An applicant's future achievement -- how well he will perform at the school in question -- should decide whether or not he is admitted. However, in researching her upcoming book, Meritocracy Inc., Harvard law professor Lani Guinier found that admissions standards do not accurately gauge merit.

"These so-called markers of merit did not actually correlate with future performance in college," Guinier said in an interview with Dollars & Sense magazine, "but rather correlated more with an applicant's parents' and even grandparents' wealth."

Guinier will give the Malcolm X Annual Human Rights Lecture at the Penn Law School today at noon.

The SAT is a flagrant example of a class-based criterion that masquerades as an indicator of intelligence. According to research published by the group Students Against Testing, "Students taking the SAT will score an extra 30 points for every $10,000 in their parents' income."

This comes as no surprise. Kaplan Inc., a test-prep company that earns more than $500 million in annual revenues, guarantees that its classes will increase a student's SAT scores.

Can you imagine a clearer correlation between wealth and scores?

Guinier cites a recent Harvard University study that indicates a negative correlation between SAT scores and student performance. According to a PBS interview, the study, which followed 30 Harvard graduates over 30 years, was designed to determine what kind of student succeeded in achieving Harvard's ideals: financial success, career satisfaction and contribution to society (and Harvard). "The two variables that most predicted which students would achieve these criteria were low SAT scores and a blue-collar background," she told Dollars & Sense.

So SAT scores not only reflect class more than merit, but also completely fail to predict a student's potential.

Furthermore, schools concerned with academic rankings are inevitably reluctant to admit students, no matter how qualified, with SAT scores that will drag down the school's average.

The legacy system is another policy that undermines meritocracy in admissions. Nothing seems more anachronistically aristocratic than the idea of allowing the relation of students' parents to an academic institution to affect their applications.

College senior Fatimah Muhammad, former academic chairwoman of the United Minorities Council, believes that the way Penn's admissions office recruits students also impedes merit-based admissions.

"Recruiters tend to return to the schools that they know generate a lot of Penn applicants," she said, pointing out that this practice prevents students at underrepresented schools from meeting recruiters and learning about Penn.

Statistics support the notion that students from low-income families are underrepresented at top schools. A study conducted by Anthony Carnevale, then-vice president of the Educational Testing Service, found that only 3 percent of students at America's 146 most selective schools were from the bottom 25 quartile of the socio-economic spectrum.

There are a number of ways in which schools can make their admissions policies more meritocratic. In 1998, Texas legislators passed a law guaranteeing admission to any state university for any student who graduates in the top 10 percent of his class. While some predicted that Texas universities would suffer if "objective" criteria like SAT scores were eliminated, Guinier stated that "those who've come in based on the 10-percent plan have had higher freshman-year grades."

California has since enacted similar legislation.

At the beginning of this year, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings convened the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. The commission, which includes Penn Graduate School of Education professor Robert Zemsky, will address the challenge of making higher education affordable and accessible to everyone who wishes to pursue it. In addition to looking at the economic barriers to educational meritocracy, the commission -- and Penn -- must reassess the way in which students' merit is measured.

Daniel Nieh is a senior East Asian Languages and Civilizations major from Portland, Ore. Low End Theory appears on Fridays.

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