Taking A Deep Dive Into the College Board’s New Adversity Score

RustyTrowel
Thu, 13 Jun 2019 00:00:28 +0000

Remember, CB is the same organization that brought us the CSS Profile. So let’s stop calling CB’s new score an “Adversity Score”, and start calling it what it really is: a “Projected EFC” tier score based on the projected financial standing (projected assets and income) of the student’s family. Think for a moment about just how much data CB has. It would not be hard to distill the historical CSS Profile data already on file (wealth, broadly defined) into a Projected Family Financial Strength metric that would nearly perfectly correlate to actual EFC when viewed on a portfolio basis. I’ll bet CB has enough data to get an accurate P-EFC tier score down to the street level in many communities. Now look at this from the perspective of the typical ‘need-aware’ school. Imagine that you are the one who is responsible for deciding between admitting one of two URMs, each of whom has similar apps, except one is P-EFC tier 46 and the other is P-EFC tier 61. It won’t be long before the schools will know what a delta of 15 P-EFC tier points means in terms of revenue to the school. From the school’s perspective, could you afford not to use this information? Really? Most schools do not have an endowment large enough to allow them to make need-unaware decisions. Heck, you might even start to reconsider that policy about not requiring the SAT for admissions…which was CB’s objective all along.