(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . How to achieve racial diversity in college despite SCOTUS banning race in considering admission [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-06-29 Today, checking another item off the Conservative wishlist, the Supreme Court in effect banned universities from considering race in admissions. This decision means the law now restricts schools to the traditional methods of favoring one group over another. Michelle Obama enumerated these factors in her thoughts on SCOTUS’s ruling “Of course, students on my campus and countless others across the country were – and continue to be – granted special consideration for admissions. Some have parents who graduated from the same school. Others have families who can afford coaches to help them run faster or hit a ball harder. Others go to high schools with lavish resources for tutors and extensive standardized test prep that help them score higher on college entrance exams. We don't usually question if those students belong. So often, we just accept that money, power, and privilege are perfectly justifiable forms of affirmative action, while kids growing up like I did are expected to compete when the ground is anything but level.” Bearing this stark truth in mind, we must ask if there is a way that universities can consider race in admissions without overtly doing so. There is. Admissions officers should award more points for high school class ranking and fewer for national exam results. Affluent parents buy houses in high-performing suburban school districts, while America’s poor frequently live in urban and rural areas with little tradition of academic achievement. Success breeds success. Teens with college-educated parents are more likely to get into good schools not just because of money and what it can buy, but also because their parents understand the system. Many up-by-their-bootstraps politicians proclaim they were “the first one from my family to go to college.” They celebrate it as a breakthrough because it is hard to do. Even if a state showers money on poor-performing school districts. the results can be disappointing because those communities have no university-going tradition. The solution is to reward students who do the best in their respective communities. Universities should award admission points to those at the top of their high school, whatever the circumstances of that school. Instead of picking an arbitrary, one-size-fits-all measure of ability — like the SATs. Let us imagine a world where SAT scores are the only consideration in college admissions. Take twenty pairs of identical twins. Put one of the pair in a high-achieving high school and the other in a school on the wrong side of the tracks. The average SAT scores of each group will be different even though their genetic makeup is the same. If you change the admissions consideration to be solely on class rank, then an equal number of both schools' students will go to college — which better reflects the inherent ability of the twins. One argument against race-based college entrance is that schools will admit less qualified people to the detriment of other students with higher test scores. That is misdirection. Admission based on class rank rewards those students who have sown they can master the circumstances they were born into. They have taken part in the same challenge as their peers and come out on top. Exam-based admissions say that the average student in one pool is a higher achiever than the top student in another. But imagine circumstances had switched them at birth. And the students born to single parents in academic deserts are instead raised by affluent parents in good school districts. Those average students in the first school would probably still be average in the second. While the top students in one school will still be the top in the other. In essence, exam-based — and even more, legacy-based and money-based — admissions policies reward circumstances. And not the inherent ability of each student. Nay-sayers will protest that students from inner-city/rural schools are unprepared for college and are more likely to drop out. Perhaps they are — as it stands. But to turn away from doing the right thing because it is difficult is a symptom of weakness. To quote JFK, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.” JFK came from a wealthy, privileged family. If he were alive today, he would probably be the first to acknowledge he won the birth lottery. And he would have supported measures to increase the likelihood that people, who were not born with his advantages, could also have gone to Harvard. Young Americans are not guaranteed equality of outcome. But they should be guaranteed equality of opportunity. And no American teen should be held back because of circumstances beyond their control. 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