Merit Means More Than Grades and Tests

The Supreme Court’s decision overturning half a century of affirmative action in higher education will force colleges and universities to reconsider their admissions processes and the purposes these processes serve. These institutions can promote both individual excellence and a more inclusive society while fully complying with the court’s ruling.

When I was in the Boy Scouts, we received merit badges. The concept was straightforward: You received a badge if you demonstrated the required knowledge or skill in a particular area. This definition of merit worked well enough for the scouts, but it won’t do for admission to selective schools. Getting into college is more than a recognition of past performance. Admissions officers also must judge whether an applicant can perform at the requisite level in the future. They make a prediction, which involves a measure of uncertainty.

These officers look for evidence to reduce the degree of uncertainty. High-school grades are only one such indicator. Students with mediocre grades but high scores on national standardized tests such as the SAT or ACT could have the potential to do better than they have in the past. But if they aren’t motivated to do better, they probably won’t. Assessing motivation isn’t a science, yet schools have to because some of the most creative and successful adults are late bloomers, and colleges can’t afford to overlook them.

There’s an additional complication: Students come from a range of circumstances. Differences in family background, neighborhood, economic status and quality of schools affect future educational attainment. Some high schools in poor areas don’t offer advanced courses in science and mathematics, so even their best students don’t have an opportunity to develop and demonstrate aptitude in these subjects.

To address such disparities, institutions such as the University of Texas at Austin accept a fixed percentage of the highest-achieving students from every high school in their state, even if the best students in the underperforming schools have lower levels of educational attainment and lower scores on standardized tests. The bet is that regardless of their background, top students have shown that they want to take advantage of the opportunities. Past performance matters, but what these students can do in the future matters more.

The purpose of higher education extends beyond academic achievement. Many institutions say they want to develop the leaders of tomorrow. If so, an applicant’s demonstration of leadership potential is relevant. A high-school student who creates a community-service program that attracts others’ participation would likely be a solid applicant. While many students focus on the drama of their own lives in application essays, others may use the space to highlight their commitment to future leadership in civil society, the private sector, or public life.

Other social considerations matter as well. It would be easy for medical schools to choose their entering classes based on the college performance of their applicants. But top grades alone may produce a disproportionate number of medical researchers and highly paid specialists, exacerbating shortages in other areas—such as gerontology and internal medicine—that could diminish the quality of the medical care we routinely experience.

Here too, character and motivation make a difference. While empathy and patience may matter less for surgeons, they are crucial for doctors who spend their days caring for children, the elderly and the mentally ill. Medical schools can’t ignore these qualities as they make admissions decisions. Similarly, many poor minority communities experience chronic shortages of medical care. The determination of some applicants to work in these communities should be relevant in admissions decisions.

For much of the 20th century, the Protestant establishment used qualitative factors such as character and leadership potential to exclude Jews, Catholics and others from certain educational institutions and professions. Quantitative standards such as national tests helped break down barriers and open doors to talented students no matter their background.

In recent decades, however, it has become clear that the definition of merit reflected in quantitative standards was too narrow and created new forms of exclusion. This has led some thinkers to reject the idea of merit and view it as an affront to individual equality and social solidarity.

This overreaction is wrong in theory and damaging in practice. Whenever the ability to do a task well matters, so does merit. Our current challenge is not to discard merit, but rather to understand it better—and use this new understanding to extend opportunities to all who can take advantage of it.