College admissions decisions are increasingly being based on the wealth of the students applying instead of true merit, according to Harvard law professor Dr. Lani Guinier.
Guinier, who spoke Friday at the first annual Creating Institutional Change Conference at the Madison Concourse Hotel, 1 W. Dayton Sr., was the first black woman to be appointed to a tenured professorship at Harvard Law School. In 1993, President Clinton nominated Guinier to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
Guinier said many institutions of higher education are not fulfilling their promises to turn out the leaders of tomorrow.
Most of these institutions are defaulting on that mission, even as they claim to be committed to democracy and to training future leaders that are failing to uphold their end of the social contract,\ Guinier said.
One cause of this defaulting, according to Guinier, comes from the criteria used by many universities to determine eligibility for admission.
""They say performance on the SAT predicts first-year college grades. Now I have yet to hear an institution of higher education who said its mission is to determine who will do well first year in college,"" Guinier said. ""It is not enough to say that people with the highest LSAT or SAT are somehow more deserving of admission to your institution.""
Casting further doubt on the validity of using standardized tests as primary admission qualifications, she commented on the effects of socio-economic status and test scores.
""Within each race and ethnic group, as your parents' income goes up, so do your LSAT and SAT scores,"" Dr. Guinier said. ""So in some ways we have a measure that is correlating with wealth and yet we call it merit. In fact, if you know someone's SAT score, you can better predict their grandparents' wealth than you can their first-year college grades.""
These issues hit home for Stephanie Cowan, a UW-Madison graduate student in educational policies studies.
""I thought that she was dead- on with a lot of the issues I was concerned about, and I was happy to have her get a lot of the issue I was concerned about out there,"" Cowan said.
According to Guinier, the admissions process can affect family life, too.
""The admissions process is the moment when these institutions are intervening in our culture and creating backwards pressure on middle-class … child-rearing processes, so that parents begin to measure themselves as parents based on where their children get admitted to college.""
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