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

collegemomjam
Thu, 13 Jun 2019 11:17:40 +0000

I just think this conversation and the many others like it continue to prove we will never have a system that is entirely fair and maybe we should just accept it and move on. We all have our own personal stories about how we or our children or friends’ children were “unfairly” treated in the college admissions process. I work with lots of kids in college admissions and overall I feel like the decisions made by the colleges are pretty “fair”…the kids with the higher scores and better grades are the ones getting into the better colleges. Yes there are athletes and legacies and URMs getting in with lower stats here and there, but overall, I feel like the results are directionally correct. And most kids, no matter what your status/background, get rejected from the top tier schools and probably would still get rejected if we didn’t have adversity scores or AA, or whatever. When colleges have a single digit acceptance rate, it’s almost like saying it’s not fair that you didn’t win the lottery.

This process will never be fair and no matter how we change things there will be winners and losers, people that get more of a bump than they deserve and people that get hurt in the process more than they deserve. But the kids in the latter scenario, especially if they have money, can still achieve great things at the universities that are lucky enough to get them.