Well, there is probably a positive correlation with race because in America wealth and income are highly correlated with race. It is not a perfect correlation though and I'm sure there are many people from rural areas that would benefit from the adversity metrics. I'm not sure if any attempt to address adversity should simply be dismissed because of the correlation with race.
In fact this sounds like the right way to adjust test score expectations -- if someone came from a place with little opportunity, but still scores reasonably well, that means a lot more than someone who had a lot of opportunity and only made use of some of it. The applications would look very similar to a college admittance board, so I think this is a positive change. Using race as a proxy for opportunity levels growing up is entirely the wrong way to approach the problem because 1) you can have people in "disadvantaged" races who had lots of opportunity who get an unfair, unneeded boost and 2) (more important imo) you don't disadvantage folks from an "advantaged" race who actually faced a lot of adversity growing up. A white kid who grows up in a trailer park going to a public school should be given a helping hand over a kid from [insert other race here] who grew up attending a $50k/year private school.
Of course, any system has its problems. I'm sure that people will find a way to game this system when they don't deserve the advantage even though it sounds like a reasonably implemented idea. Just hiding the scores doesn't fix this, because someone corrupt enough to try to game this won't care if they're doing something immoral anyway. As someone who would have benefited a lot from this growing up, I think it's a great idea. We just have to hope the inherent good ideas here outweigh the immoral system-gamers.
> A white kid who grows up in a trailer park going to a public school should be given a helping hand over a kid from [insert other race here] who grew up attending a $50k/year private school.
Or maybe it isn't a helping hand. Maybe it's just a recognition that the kid, in getting to the level he/she is at through all that adversity, may be displaying more talent than the advantaged kid.
You can think of it as social justice, giving a helping hand to those who need it. Or you can think of it as trying to adjust measures of achievement in order to measure actual talent instead.
While it is correlated, I think it’s more fair than straight racial quotas. Why should my child who grew up in the burbs with great school systems get extra consideration because he’s Black and the poor White kid gets lumped in with my son’s (predominantly White) classmates who have had every opportunity in the world?
Too many people in the bubble don’t understand why “Rural America” was so easily led into populism. This is why.
Of course I don’t agree with the race baiting that has become part of the Right. It’s Willy Horton 2.0. But I do understand it.
No, those detailed individual non-race factors are being used as a better measure of actual disadvantage than race, just as the opponents of race-based affirmative action in admissions always argued they should be, because race-based admissions risked favoring the rare already-advantaged members of races whose members were on-average disadvantaged while doing nothing for the truly disadvantaged regardless of race.
(Of course, perhaps they did so dishonestly with the hope that raced-based affirmative action would get axed but that alternative race-blind alternative measures wouldn't materialize.)
Now, do they have racially disparate impact? Only insofar as actual adversity does.
Living in rural southern Appalachia and occasionally getting stuck behind the school bus dropping off the [white] kids who live in the trailer park that butts up to my property, I absolutely beg to differ. There are more white people living in poverty than all other races combined, it's just not sexy or cool to advocate for them. There have also been studies that show Appalachians are often discriminated against in the college admissions process because of where they're from.
I'm all for this. There is untapped genius in trailer parks and backwoods hollers and at the end of long and winding gravel driveways, just as there is in inner city black neighborhoods and the far more invisible rural black communities in the Deep South. All are absolutely deserving of a little extra help in breaking the cycle of systemic poverty, be it urban poverty or rural poverty.