Polls show that the wokesters’ vision of the ideal admissions process is wildly out of step with the American public’s.
Polls show that the wokesters’ vision of the ideal admissions process is wildly out of step with the American public’s.
D ebates over college admissions have grown increasingly contentious in recent years.
During the pandemic, hundreds of colleges made the SAT and ACT optional, and campus wokesters are hoping to preserve that change as part of their larger assault on the merit-based pillars of the education system. Left-wing academics have demanded an end to “racist tests like the SAT and ACT” as part of “dismantling white supremacy.” The Common App, used by more than 1 million students to apply to over 900 colleges each year, was revamped in 2021 to promote an “anti-racist college admissions process.” The 25,000-member National Association for College Admission Counseling has urged public universities to ditch testing requirements in favor of “new, more equitable metrics” and launched an Antiracist Education Institute to address “pervasive systemic racism at the individual level in all corners of society, including the college admission counseling professionals.”
Now, much of this is nonsensical. After all, the SAT was created a century ago in order to promote fairness by gauging college readiness with a consistent, arm’s-length standard. Absent the SAT and ACT, admissions officials wind up placing even more weight on things such as letters of recommendation (hardly objective), essays (frequently shaped by parents or admissions coaches), and extracurricular activities (readily exaggerated or distorted). All of this, of course, favors applicants with access to resources, connections, college-educated parents, and pricey consultants.
But while the anti-test crusade may not make much sense on its merits, it has garnered visibility, sympathetic media coverage, and momentum in higher education. And that raises the question of whether it has swayed the public to its side.
Reassuringly, new polling by the Pew Research Center makes the answer clear: It hasn’t. Earlier this spring, Pew asked 10,441 U.S. adults what should factor into college admissions. When presented with a list of factors that colleges might consider and asked whether each should be a major factor, a minor factor, or a nonfactor, 93 percent of respondents said that high-school grades should be a factor. Eighty-five percent said that standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT should be a factor. And 67 percent said that community service should be a factor. Contra the ideologues, this seems like a pretty sensible ordering of priorities.
Indeed, despite slight shifts in the various figures, Pew reports that “the relative importance of each of these factors” to poll respondents “is unchanged since 2019” — before the pandemic and the current woke moment. Notably, there’s remarkable agreement across partisan and racial lines on all of this. Ninety-four percent of white adults think high-school grades should be a factor in admissions, as do 89 percent of black and Asian adults, 91 percent of Hispanic adults, and 93 percent of both Republicans and Democrats.
There’s also wide support for using standardized tests as a factor. Eighty-seven percent of white adults think test scores should be a factor, as do 79 percent of black adults, 84 percent of Asian adults, 81 percent of Hispanic adults, 89 percent of Republicans, and 84 percent of Democrats.
Equally telling is what the public doesn’t think should factor into admissions: race, legacy status, and gender. With the Supreme Court poised to weigh in on race-based affirmative action, just 26 percent of Pew’s respondents said that race or ethnicity should be a factor, and only 18 percent said that gender should. This really isn’t too surprising. After all, in 2020, even deep-blue California, where voters delivered President Biden a massive margin of victory over Donald Trump, they simultaneously rejected a proposal to reinstate affirmative action — by a margin unchanged since they first voted to ban it back in 1996.
In other words, college-admissions wokesters’ growing disdain for merit and their growing fascination with issues of race and gender put them wildly out of step with the American public. Americans on the right and the left agree that college admissions should reflect personal accomplishments rather than demographics. And if campus bureaucrats can’t bring themselves to see the sense in this, elected officials need to speak up on behalf of the public that subsidizes our bloated college-industrial complex.
Frederick M. Hess is the director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Hayley Sanon is the program manager of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network.