[virtuous_signal]

Remember when The College Board was developing an "adversity score" but then dropped it in the face of criticism?

I honestly wish we would just do that. We would actually have something quantitative instead of vague generalizations about "personality". The methodology could be scrutinized, and centralized (instead of every college coming up with its own special formula), and we could stop talking about this every X months.

[monoideism]

Family income is a pretty good proxy for any adversity score.

Because of the African American income gap, it would also serve to boost AA enrollment, particularly from disadvantaged inner city kids, while still not discriminating against the white kid growing up amid grinding poverty in rural Appalachia.

It’s not a perfect indicator, but it’s a very good one. On average, it even picks up on adversities such as many medical/physical disabilities, since families usually take a big financial hit on account of such issues.

[guerrilla]

This would be really nice. It's objective, quantitative, scalable and I think fair. This gets to the real problem too because if dynamics ever changed and some other groups we disadvantaged at large, they woukd automatically be advantaged here. Thus it automatically adapts to the situation. Not saying its perfect, but it'd be a great improvement.

[polartx]

"poor kids are just as bright as white kids" - joe biden

[babesh]

That is probably not true on average. Wealth correlates with intelligence especially when there is less discrimination.

[babesh]

I read a study from awhile back that said that for whites, wealth correlated with intelligence but that it didn’t with blacks when there was discrimination.

[oblio]

That's a great idea that will never happen. Rich people will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.

[jessaustin]

You're probably right about some universities, because they're attended by the children of the almost-rich. It could happen in Ivy League, however, because those who really run things there are really rich, and their children get accepted through legacy and donation quid pro quo.

[commandlinefan]

> adversity score

Hm - so people who faced more "adversity" would be propelled to the top of the list? I can see that going horribly wrong: if it worked perfectly, you'd end up with yo-yo generations where one generation went to a good college and had a successful career (and if you don't believe one thing follows from the other, why bother with the adversity score at all?) while the next would be relegated to struggling, giving their children the needed "adversity". Realistically, though, you'd have smart parents finding the right mix of adversity to give their kids a leg up just just the way they find the right mix of extracurricular and volunteer activity today.

[AmericanChopper]

What mechanism do you imagine would push high income families down the socioeconomic ladder?

Isn’t the whole problem that it’s so much easier to make money when you have money? Providing advantages to economically deprived candidates seems to be a perfectly valid mechanism for promoting social mobility to me. The entire basis of affirmative action is that past discrimination had created generations of economic hardship, and that the hardship creates a self sustaining cycle of further hardship.

If you create mechanisms to improve social mobility then you address that problem. As a bonus you do so without blatant racial discrimination, you don’t elevate the hardship of one group above the hardship of another. You create a system that actually addresses the problem, rather than handing out additional benefits to wealthy minority group members, and you avoid creating a system that people can game by claiming minority group membership based on either some minuscule percentage of heritage, or even perhaps based on no heritage at all.

[twobuy]

> right mix of extracurricular and volunteer activity today

This is close, but I imagine it would be more akin to temporarily relocating to a different school district, then selling / moving out after the children hit college age.

Note that this type of thing does aalready happen, albeit not to the extremes you're imagining. Imagine one parent retiring early or temporarily so that total family income qualifies for certain loans or grants.

[Decker87]

Nah, you'd just have wealthy people deciding how they calculate the score and making sure they can tweak the numbers to show their kids are disadvantaged.

[nradov]

Just like some wealthy parents find a friendly doctor to diagnose their child with a "learning disability" to get extra accommodations on tests. Knowing how to work the system confers huge advantages on the privileged.

[MaximumYComb]

My salary as a CEO was only $1 last year, therefore my children need access to this school.

[TheDong]

You know, I'll take "yo-yo generations" over what we've got now. Right now we've got "a massive wealth divide". "yo-yo"ing would imply that some people that are right now stuck on the bottom would at least have some time a bit higher up.

That sounds like a strict improvement over the current system, where those that struggle adversity are stuck trying to pull themselves up by their bootstrap forever.

If that means my parents made decent money, but I can't get into a good school and have to struggle a bit? Sure, fine, that's still nothing compared to those who have parents with no money and also can't get into a decent school.

[Nasrudith]

A full fledged accurate adversity score (as much as such a thing can be objectively quantified) brings to mind some very weird perverse incentives resulting from it from the sheer desperation for an edge. From deliberately sandbagging income around admission (transferring to a lower paid start up).

Not to mention potential absurd implication and emergent from a model like "due to statistical outliers the best thing for getting an average middle class child into the Ivy League is to both survive cancer and to survive a school shooting". It could rapidly turn into an absurdist comedy sketch about misery poker.

[HPsquared]

We'd just talk about the weightings of the various "adversity factors" instead, it's the same problem.

[Wolfenstein98k]

Except racking up points for your adversity is the point of such policies.

Avoiding doing so basically means you need to rack up the inverse - privilege points - except you're not allowed to do that, so it turns into obscure "penalty points" hidden in euphemisms.

[virtuous_signal]

Right, at the beginning sure, and ideally it would quickly improve. But why have all of these institutions do it individually, and out of the public eye? I doubt some random Yale admissions specialist has unique societal insights that the other institutions don't.

[s1artibartfast]

at least it would be more intellectually honest and transparent.

[xibalba]

I'm not sure an adversity could ever be anything but subjective.

[SpicyLemonZest]

That kind of quantitative methodology was scrutinized in Gratz v. Bollinger, and judged to be illegal.

[virtuous_signal]

The adversity score in this case wasn't directly related to race, but I think some facts about your school and neighborhood, so not illegal in the way that assigning point values to certain races would be.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Fair, I misread the discussion.

[president]

> We would actually have something quantitative

They're called standardized tests

[Wolfenstein98k]

To engage in this conversation you sort of need to accept the premise that colleges are being used to correct historical (and even current) injustices, and then go from there.

You may not think it's the "right" thing to do, but it's the premise on which this topic is based and figuring it only muddies the quality of the conversation.