Popping the bubble

Columbia University — which is either the second or 18th best college in the country, if you go by the data-dependent, and some say data-distorted, U.S. News rankings — has just made the two big tests high schoolers take, the SAT and ACT, optional. That’s the school’s right, but it’s a highly questionable decision.

This may be erstwhile King’s College’s way of preventing its admissions system from being upended if and when the Supreme Court rules that existing subjective admissions criteria at many schools discriminate against Asian-American students. Schools like Columbia understandably value a diverse student body; the “best students” want an admission system that looks more like a straightforward meritocracy. If there is no single apples-to-apples bar to compare students across backgrounds and schools, who can say that a college is actually discriminating against higher-performing applicants?

We worry about the effects of losing a single objective leveler that can compare, say, a teenager from a tony prep school who got a 1,400 with one from a public school without a special reputation who got a 1,600. GPAs aren’t equivalent; essays, extracurriculars and more are subject to endless subjective judgments. While the score on a test shouldn’t be strictly determinative, there’s real value in using it as one of multiple measures.

And if the ultimate point here is to give the school another tool to build a class of outstanding students with a range of backgrounds and life experiences, there’s another, more powerful step Columbia could and should take: Scrap legacy admissions, whereby children of parents who attended get a hand up at about half of the country’s selective colleges. Amherst has done it. Johns Hopkins, too. MIT has never factored it in. If an institution of higher education is truly committed to being an engine of opportunity, there’s no excuse for privileging the already privileged.

We believe in a school’s right — indeed, in its responsibility — to build diverse student bodies. A test, put in proper context, need not interfere with that. Legacy admissions necessarily does.