The SAT and the Supreme Court

After the Supreme Court banned race-based affirmative action last year, many people in higher education worried that it would be only the first in a series of decisions that reduced diversity at selective schools. In particular, university administrators and professors thought the court might soon ban admissions policies that gave applicants credit for overcoming poverty. Such class-based policies disproportionately help Black, Hispanic and Native students.

For now, though, these worries appear to be misplaced. And the future of admissions at selective colleges and high schools has suddenly become clearer.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain.

The Texas model

The situation has become clearer because the Supreme Court last week declined to hear a lawsuit against a public magnet school in Northern Virginia — Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as T.J.

Until recently, T.J. admitted students based on a mix of grades, test scores, student essays and teacher recommendations. This process led to a student body that looked very different from the area it served.

About 5 percent of T.J. students were Black or Hispanic, even though the surrounding area is about 37 percent Black or Hispanic. The school also enrolled few low-income students of every race, as Richard Kahlenberg of George Washington University has noted. Only 2 percent of Asian students at T.J. came from low-income families, compared with 20 percent of Asian students in the surrounding area.

In 2021, though, T.J. switched to a new admissions policy. It was modeled after a bipartisan plan that Texas created in 1997, under Gov. George W. Bush. In T.J.’s version, the school filled most of its freshman class by accepting the top 1.5 percent of students at every public middle school in the area.

The underlying idea is simple enough. Many communities in the U.S. are economically and racially homogenous. But a policy that accepts the top students from every community can create diverse classes. The policy is defensible on meritocratic grounds because it rewards teenagers who excel in every environment — and on political grounds because it gives all communities access to desirable schools.

Once T.J. changed its policy, the school became much more diverse. The share of students from low-income families rose to 25 percent from 2 percent. Racial diversity also increased:

“I love T.J.,” Kaiwan Bilal, one of the students accepted under the new policy, told The Washington Post. “It’s even better than I expected, better than my parents told me it would be.” Bilal also said that he was struck by the school’s diversity.

The SAT connection

Not everyone favors these changes, of course, and a group of parents and conservative legal activists sued to stop them. Their argument revolved around intent: They said that because T.J. had adopted the new policy with the goal of increasing racial diversity, it was illegal, even though it did not use racial preferences.

In higher education, many people viewed the lawsuit with alarm. If the Supreme Court ruled against T.J., almost all class-based programs would have been at risk. Racial diversity would most likely plummet, especially in the wake of the ban on race-based policies.

But the court didn’t rule against T.J. Instead, it effectively endorsed class-based programs by refusing even to hear the T.J. case. Only two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, dissented.

The news has a connection to another story in higher education: the return of the standardized test requirement at some colleges. Last week, Yale announced that it would again require test scores from applicants, joining Dartmouth, M.I.T., Georgetown and Purdue, among others. At selective colleges like these, standardized test scores predict academic performance better than high school grades, research shows.

A crucial part of the test requirement, however, is that colleges give applicants credit for overcoming disadvantage. The colleges don’t expect top students from struggling high schools to do as well on the SAT as private school students. Lower-income students, after all, have been running with the wind in their faces.

“We know society is unequal,” Sian Beilock, Dartmouth’s president, told me. “We’re looking for the kids who are excelling in their environment.” Last week’s announcement by the Supreme Court means that schools (including those that don’t require test scores) can feel comfortable taking economic disadvantage into account.

Matching public opinion

There is also a broader significance. In these politically polarized times, I know that many liberals distrust the motivations of conservatives (and vice versa). After the Supreme Court — which is dominated by conservative justices — banned racial preferences, some liberals assumed that it might start a yearslong campaign against diversity.

For now, though, cynicism seems unjustified, at least on this issue. Most justices are neither universally in favor of nor universally opposed to diversity programs. Context matters. As it happens, the court has also chosen a position that matches public opinion: Most Americans support class-based admissions policies and (as my colleague German Lopez has explained) oppose race-based policies.

T.J.’s new policy, as Kahlenberg wrote in the journal National Affairs, is “doing what America has been pining after for a quarter-century: pursuing racial and economic diversity without the use of racial preferences.”

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