The College Board recently added an "adversity score" to the SAT that "will reportedly reflect students' family income, environment and educational differences" and hence help level the playing field. Maybe all of that could be replaced by a measure of dopamine production. Rather than measuring external correlates of adversity it could be an objective measure of the actual internal experience.
I wonder how people would game that in order to increase their chances of admission.
The concept of intersectionality seems to be an attempt to measure chronic adversity using oppressed identities as a proxy. It could theoretically be replaced by a more direct, objective measure like this.
I am not a fan of the adversity score. There are a lot of things kids go through that don't make it down on paper: abuse/bullying, non-parental involvement or incompetent parents, living barely out of poverty, etc. You don't have to be a lesbian African American living in the projects to have a shit life.
Would it surprise you to know that, looking back at my own life, my being a gay black male had a lot to do with being subject to the things "that don't make it on paper?" It's not too hard to imagine that I was bullied or put down for not fitting the ideal straight male parameters, but the lack of parental involvement is a fun one, which has been experienced by many seemingly stable middle-class black families. The story is thus: academically high-achieving black Boomers/Xers must take out loans to fund their education, without the benefit of access to familial wealth or well-paying work during college (re: hiring discrimination in the 70s, 80s, and 90s). This delays their entry into the housing market until, say, the early-mid 2000s. Additionally, their career advancement is stymied by the various forces that tend to hit black workers harder - being the first to get laid off and last to be hired during and after recessions; having more difficulty finding employers and mentors interested in their growth; wage discrimination curtailing opportunity that may require investment, like professional certifications or moving to a better job; having to take less ideal, more stressful positions in order to prove worth within an organization - meaning that there is less cash outside of the real estate investment to cushion a fall.
I suspect that all this had something to do with how little support I was able to get from them when I was applying for colleges in 2007. The stresses they were experiencing - stresses which were, in their intensity, in that moment in history, largely the domain of people of color - had material effects on my ability to make my case to America's higher education system. They had too much on their plate to help me, and no one knew anything was the matter because we were a middle class family headed by parents with professional or advanced degrees. None of the colleges knew that I was dealing with that - and my sexuality, and the divorce, and depression, and body dysphoria - as I groped my way blindly through the process, alone, high SAT score and decent GPA from a STEM magnet program in hand.
My final choice and subsequent experience were resultingly lackluster, in hindsight, and if someone involved in the process had known, maybe I could have made better decisions. All this is, is acknowledging the subtractive and deleterious effects some circumstances can have on this most important of tasks, and taking action; in America, the simple experiencing of racial animus is one of those circumstances, no matter how much portions of the country harrumph about level playing fields and the past being the past. Here, friends: look up, and see how the light of 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago glints off the present.
Marginalized identity is directly related to the kinds of hardships that parent claimed were not directly associated with marginalized identity (see the first sentence). You generally have to go pretty far up the income/class scale to find black lesbian who's better off than a given poor white man.
To put it a way most guys here will understand: how much more money does a 5'4" man have to make to get the same social and professional consideration as a 6'2" man? Identity is not destiny, but at the same time, you'd be forgiven for getting that impression from a glance at American society.
It is very much so, especially in Western countries, where members of the black diaspora tend to be found and are able to express LGBT identity without fear of facing full and immediate ostracization (though violence is still a risk). If you consider, for example, suicide risk a crude measure for (lack of) life satisfaction, being LGBT reverses the black-white disparity (wherein white people are more likely to commit suicide, considering the general population).
People also underestimate how easy it is to cheat. One of the richest people I met in College was also on full financial aid and received in-state tuition despite being from out-of-state. All he had to do was lie on a couple forms. He was also on foodstamps so that he could spend more of his monthly stipend on drugs and alchohol.
There will always be bad actors in any system, and its still worth having aid programs even though a few people take advantage of them, but there needs to be serious checks and balances first.
TLDR; college organizations can't be trusted to audit themselves so we need a combination of government regulation with teeth, consumer advocacy, and full transparency, in order to achieve the best outcome of an initiative such as an adversity score.
I recall that in my home state, the school system there reported that of the myriad of special concessions requests made and given for testing in the final year of school, the majority (I believe over 60%?) came from Private Schools and to the wealthiest areas. (Despite being the minority of schools).
The reason likely being twofold - Access/Knowledge of the system, as well as a pressure to improve their marks.
I.e. These private schools make their name and are in many ways partially paid for by parents because it promises better marks than sending them to public schools.
So they use every trick they have to get special dispensations and raise student's marks, leading to the bulk of these extra marks and time going to the wealthier, privileged areas.
As well as that, note that I'm not saying that all of these students are necessarily cheating by doing this, many of these students have their own problems (though many didn't too!) but the access and knowledge of how to use the system is also a part of being privileged.
Be careful with that private school generalization. I send my kids to private school (on my dime). For all my kids, I would say on average about 40% of each class has kids there on scholarship - some classes more, some less, with scholarship being needs-based, performance-based, or both. So the implied "private school kids come from wealth" generalization isn't always true.
Private school kids being always rich was not implied. A skew towards wealth in private schools however, is.
Which is clearly true.
I mean, I'm married to a lady who went to a private school. I wish she was rich.
The point was, adding concessions to a system often exacerbates the gap between poor and everyone else, which is not what people would necessarily expect.
Some people might be fine with that, it's just the combination of an aptitude test with another type of metric they object to. Chicken soup and chocolate milk are both good, but maybe not mixed together.
The problem with an "adversity score", as stated in another comment, is that it doesn't actually measure the adversity that an individual faces. It's not chocolate milk, it's diarrhea milk. It doesn't accurately measure the unique stresses or difficulties that a student faces in life. Plenty of students do fine being raised by a single father or mother, and some have a terrible time being raised by two terrible parents. Some students have mental health issues or are victims of bullying. Some students have disabilities that affect their academic performance.
I wonder how people would game that in order to increase their chances of admission.
The concept of intersectionality seems to be an attempt to measure chronic adversity using oppressed identities as a proxy. It could theoretically be replaced by a more direct, objective measure like this.