May-June 2008

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Affirmative Action, the SAT, and the Public U

The Conditions for Admission: Access, Equity, and the Social Contract of Public Universities.
John Aubrey Douglass. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Reviewed by Joseph A. Soares

John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, brilliantly captures the dilemmas facing admissions at public universities in The Conditions for Admission: Access, Equity, and the Social Contract of Public Universities. Douglass’s substantive theme is the “social contract” of public universities with their sponsoring state to promote economic growth and social mobility in exchange for resources. He writes, “America’s public universities were conceived, funded, and developed as tools of socioeconomic engineering.” Douglass does not, however, explore either the wealth creation or the social mobility output of public universities; rather, he deals primarily with the social input that comes from admissions policies, practices, and controversies.

Douglass’s book demonstrates the advantages of employing historical and comparative evidence to illuminate university admissions from the vantage point of an exemplary case study. His narrative stretches from the University of California’s humble nineteenth-century land grant origins through the fabled partnership between public universities and high schools, in which the former certified and set standards that qualified the latter’s graduates for university admission. He tells of the great transformation of the 1960s, when the university school partnership dissolved and UC admissions became less focused on the high school curricula than on racial disparities and standardized testing, and continues on to contemporary times, when UC exposed the irrelevance of, but failed to eliminate, the SAT.
 
Douglass is to be congratulated for crafting a volume on public university admissions that complements the current flourish of publications on the private sector (which includes Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen, Daniel Golden’s The Price of Admission, Michael L. Stevens’s Creating a Class, and my own The Power of Privilege). There are other new books, including Peter Sacks’s Tearing Down the Gates and Peter Schmidt’s Color and Money, that range beyond the elite sector, but Douglass’s treatment of public universities is unsurpassed.

Although his nineteenth-century historical prologue and final two pessimistic chapters on how privatization and globalization threaten the social contract are thought provoking, the meat here is in the middle. Two intriguing narratives are at the center of this book, one about affirmative action and the other about the SAT. Douglass writes well and in depth about African American, Hispanic, and Asian issues in the UC system and about internal efforts to refine the academic criteria of admissions. Along the way he gives vivid accounts of important events and actors.

If anyone ever needed a reminder that American universities are not republics of reason in which faculty citizen-legislators deliberate to set and implement enlightened policies and practices, this book should do the job. In admissions, administrators and external political forces, not the faculty, have driven change. The race-sensitive admissions policy—from its initiation in 1964 to the UC regents’ vote against it in 1995—was a program of the administration. “Neither Berkeley’s . . . academic senate nor the senate’s UC-wide admissions board, BOARS [Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools], had much to do with the profound shift toward racial preferences in admissions,” Douglass writes. When affirmative action came under political attack, there was not a body of research or an informed and aroused faculty to defend it. The first serious empirical examination of affirmative action admissions programs, William Bowen and Derek Bok’s The Shape of the River, came from the elite private sector of higher education.

The UC faculty’s record on the SAT is also less than inspirational. Before the regents voted in 1968 to require the SAT, the University of California, like most other public universities, admitted residents of the state based on high school grades and class rank. Students taking the SAT resided overwhelmingly in the northeast and headed toward private colleges in that region. After the University of California embraced the SAT, the test spread nationwide, ensuring its legitimacy as “a new gold standard for measuring . . . the prestige of an institution.” Why did UC play a key part in the consecration of the SAT? Why did it want the SAT?

Research conducted by BOARS again and again—in 1955, 1958,1962, and 1964—showed that the SAT contributed nothing to the board’s ability to predict academic performance. There were, however, two things in favor of the SAT. Population pressures were building, and a flood of applicants threatened to swamp admissions boards. The SAT was a convenient bureaucratic mechanism for eliminating candidates. Douglass notes, “The SAT might not be a good predictor of future academic achievement, but it was a tool for excluding students and, thereby, reducing enrollment demand.” The bias of the SAT against youths of low socioeconomic status was at the time ignored. The second thing going for the SAT was the status envy UC president Clark Kerr had for the Ivy League. Kerr’s pursuit of prestige was successfully exploited by Educational Testing Service (ETS) president Henry Chauncey. Chauncey set up an office in Berkeley and “persuade[d] the University of California to join the ETS board as an institutional member—the first public university to join.” ETS gave the University of California a seat and repeatedly offered free trial runs of the SAT “in the hope of enticing the university into the fold.” By 1968, the game paid off. The University of California signed up, and the SAT got a lock on both coasts.

Subsequent efforts to drop the SAT were derailed by professors and administrators. When a task force in 1977 recommended discontinuing the SAT, many professors were suspicious of what they perceived to be an “anti-testing” bias; they thought that affirmative action was undermining standards and that criticisms of the SAT were just a part of racial politics. With few exceptions, “most faculty continued to demonstrate interest in one thing: getting smarter students with higher test scores.” Academics gave at least tacit approval to the notion that the SAT predicted college competence.

Faculty opinion at the University of California swung around and turned against the SAT once a new UC president, Richard Atkinson, authorized and publicized research showing that the SAT was still useless as a measure of academic success. Unless ETS can refute the University of California’s research, the findings of BOARS statisticians Saul Geiser and Roger Studley are clear: the SAT measures socioeconomic status, not college grades. Douglass cites a subsequent study, Learning and Academic Engagement in the Multiversity, which reported results of the first University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey. The study found that the SAT does predict the likelihood that a college student will spend more time in social activities than in academic ones:

Academic engagement is inversely related to scores on the SAT verbal test. Because of the negative relationship between family income and academic engagement, and because of the strong positive correlation between SAT scores and family income, it turns out that SAT scores . . . are positively related to measures of social engagement and academic irresponsibility and negatively related to measures of academic engagement.

Douglass shows how ETS outflanked the University of California by discontinuing the old SAT and by creating a new test that protects its market share and keeps its prospects in Asia and Europe alive. No one has “stepped up to the plate” to carry forward the fight over standardized testing. And, Douglass concludes, “that’s exactly how the ETS likes it.” Everyone interested in admissions, public and private, should read this book.

Joseph A. Soares is associate professor of sociology at Wake Forest University. He is the author of The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges.