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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
It's refreshing to read about the flip-flopping opinions and open-minded debates of ETS's founders, because today the discussions have become harshly polarized -- Dr. Pangloss meets Ebenezer Scrooge. Take, for example, the storm that broke out last month, when the research department of ETS revealed that it was experimenting with a new way to report SAT scores to colleges. The new formula would have identified "Strivers" -- students who scored 200 points higher on the SAT than their socioeconomic background would predict. One version of the Strivers formula would have accounted for race, and upon editorial-page writers, this had the effect of blood poured into a shark tank. Within days, even the president of the College Board, the association that oversees ETS, was disparaging the innovation.
The Strivers were burked, but not quickly enough to prevent a hail of statistics and canards from pelting the media. "When you look at a Striver who gets a 1000," ETS vice president Anthony Carnevale told the Wall Street Journal, "you're looking at someone who really performs at a 1200." Nonsense, countered Harvard professor Abigail Thernstrom in the New Republic. In fact, Thernstrom wrote, it was "one of the buried but depressing facts" in William Bowen and Derek Bok's pro-affirmative-action book, "The Shape of the River," that black students already "earn substantially lower grades in college than their SATs would lead us to predict."
Thernstrom was right about the academic underperformance of blacks, and she was right to call it depressing. But she was wrong to say that Bok and Bowen "buried" this fact. Actually, the 1998 book is so forthcoming with facts it could bliss out even the most hardened empiricist. "Black students with the same SAT scores as whites tend to earn lower grades," Bok and Bowen point out, and they accompany this observation with an 18-page analysis and an easy-to-read chart.
Bok and Bowen's book does reward close reading, however; as former university presidents, the two are men of tact, and so there are facts they do bury. My own favorite is in Table 5.1, which compares the average 1995 earned incomes of a group who entered college in 1976. The data are sorted by race, gender, SAT scores and the selectivity of the college attended. You would expect whites to earn more than blacks, and they do. You would expect men to earn more than women, and they do. You would expect graduates of more prestigious colleges to earn more than those of less prestigious colleges, and they do. You would expect people who score high on the SAT to earn more than those who score low.
They don't. As it turns out, the highest wages belong to the white men with the lowest SAT scores at the most prestigious colleges. This is a remarkable statistic. Opponents of affirmative action like to talk about academic merit, and overall, black and Hispanic applicants to selective colleges benefit from an admissions handicap of about 0.67 GPA points and 400 SAT points. But Table 5.1 suggests that on the margins, where the white would-
Originally, "SAT" stood for "Scholastic Aptitude Test," later changed to "Scholastic Assessment Test." According to Lemann, today the letters "literally don't stand for anything." Whatever the test measures, SAT scores in and of themselves do not have all that much to do with earning potential. They have a great deal to do with what college you go to, however. And the next link in the chain is where the correlation pays off: Where you go to college has everything to do with your future income. Conservatives from time to time float the specter of the minority student whose life was ruined because affirmative action threw him into a rigorous academic environment he couldn't handle. No such animal, statistically speaking: Attending a selective college substantially improves a minority student's chances of graduating. It also adds a bonus to the minority student's future income. The trouble is that, as Bok and Bowen's Table 5.1 demonstrates, it also adds a bonus for whites, in even greater dollar amounts.
Nonetheless, elite colleges unexpectedly and rather doggedly prefer a black alumnus who earns $86,700 a year over a white alumnus who earns $132,700. Their motive, according to Bowen and Bok, is enlightened self-interest. Elite institutions believe that the nation as a whole will prosper politically if its minorities have educated leaders, and that it will prosper economically, too, because black and Hispanic executives will be better able to sell to minority consumers and motivate minority workers. Unfortunately, this high-capitalist rationale doesn't sit all that well with the whites shut out of elite colleges. In fact, as California's Proposition 209 demonstrates, its condescension is fiercely resented.
