Unwilling to drop racial preferences in admissions, colleges are now being advised to redefine merit to include race.
Unwilling to drop racial preferences in admissions, colleges are now being advised to redefine merit to include race.
E arlier this year, the Supreme Court held that colleges and universities can no longer elevate race over merit in their admissions decisions. EducationCounsel, a leading education consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., has devised a clever way to get around this: Redefine merit to include race.
In July, EducationCounsel shared guidance with college and university admissions officers on how they can continue “toward the achievement of diversity and equity goals in light of the Court’s decision.” “As an important initial step,” the firm advised, “consider conducting a data-driven evaluation of whether merit definitions and measures in admissions policies are mission-aligned and have predictive value.” In particular, “reconsider and recalibrate criteria associated with merit in admission, such as grade thresholds, test use practices, and the extent to which student context is considered part of the admissions decision.”
The elimination of standardized-testing requirements for college admissions is nothing new; many schools had done so well in advance of the decision given racial disparities in SAT and ACT performance. What is new — and deeply Orwellian — is EducationCounsel’s attempt to define merit as “an applicant’s skills, knowledge, or character-related qualities that arise from ‘experiences as an individual,’ which may be associated with their racial identity” rather than the applicant’s academic prowess.
At a November event for College Board, Art Coleman, EducationCounsel’s co-founder and managing partner, explained that if the mission of a college or university is to advance diversity and equity, then applicants whose identities align with this mission should be given preference. Under Coleman’s understanding of merit, presumably, a black student who writes his application essay about overcoming “systemic racism” might be considered more intelligent and prepared for higher education than, say, a Korean-American student who gets a perfect score on the SAT.
Even organizations outside of higher education have subscribed to EducationCounsel’s redefinition of merit. In its response to the Court’s decision, the New York State Bar Association referenced the firm’s July guidance letter six times and advised law schools in the Empire State to “consider reevaluating the criteria for assessing merit, including standardized test scores.” It warned law firms that “overreliance on a student’s GPA might not be appropriate or determinative of a student’s career outcome and is often at the expense of evaluating a prospect’s qualities and abilities more holistically.”
EducationCounsel has been trying to redefine the concept of merit for some time. In 2019, College Board published a playbook for “advancing higher education diversity goals” that was co-authored by Coleman. It explains that “adhering to principles of holistic review that consider multiple measures of preparedness and merit (i.e., a student’s academic, nonacademic, and contextual backgrounds) is critical to making the kinds of nuanced and individualized judgements called for to achieve robust student diversity.” It instructs colleges and universities to create “admissions materials that allow students to represent academic preparedness in multiple ways, in addition to or in lieu of test scores.”
EducationCounsel’s effort to redefine merit to include race is based on two misconceptions. First, that the mission of a college or university should be anything other than producing and disseminating knowledge, and, second, that elevating racial identity over grades and test scores in the admissions process will improve opportunities and outcomes for black and Latino students, who are underrepresented in higher education.
Research shows that grades and standardized-test scores are predictive of how a student will fare in college and beyond. Those who do not have the academic credentials to be at an elite school such as Harvard or the University of California, Berkeley, but are nonetheless admitted may very well struggle.
If EducationCounsel wants to help marginalized students gain access to higher education, then it should spend less time redefining merit and more time addressing racial disparities in educational achievement. To suggest that black and Latino kids are incapable of merit properly understood is not only false, it’s also racist.