You win some, you lose some with the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors, who recently took a belated two steps forward and one step back in admissions policy for the state’s flagship university.
Last week at the Board’s bi-monthly meeting it adjusted LSU’s admission standards. Since 2018, the Board has been out of compliance with Board of Regents standards by granting admission to a greater proportion of students scoring below a 22 on the ACT standardized test (in other words, those in the bottom fourth-sevenths of all takers) than Board rules permit. For the past eight years the Regents spinelessly allowed LSU to flout the rules.
But now, the pendulum has swung back – at least halfway. Starting for next fall, taking the ACT will be required for admission for students with a high school grade point average of below 3.5, and then for all the year after. In the past it was optional, so for those students not taking it (or not choosing to submit a score to LSU) they were evaluated on mostly subjective criteria.
However, this only is a half-measure. For now, LSU will not return to keeping those with scores below 22 out if their total numbers exceed 8 percent of admissions. Depending upon the black box of decision-making, that may mean no substantive change at all (although given how low that score is, it’s hardly genuinely selective so in some sense this is all a tempest in a teapot).
In the discussion about the change, there were a lot of half-truths about the issue which obscured the real reasons why the departing policy was implemented and now why it’s been watered-down. Many of the same retread arguments, as deficient then as now, were recycled against it, dealing with somehow it was “discriminatory” against students in certain demographic groups. At least they brought a new wrinkle, that somehow “test preparation” and the presumable extra costs involved prices out families with lesser incomes, according to Supervisor James Williams. He also alleged that “testing bias” existed on a regional and other bases, reasons he called “compelling.”
Except it’s all buncombe. Research consistently has demonstrated that such tests are not biased, even as they may reflect differences across groups. Further, test preparation makes a difference only for the most intensive intervention, private tutoring, in which only an extremely small proportion of families can engage (and admittedly with typically very high incomes).
Yet officials arguing in favor as well didn’t tell the whole truth about the process. They asserted that when the plunge was taken that there was doubt about whether standardized tests told anything additional about future potential student success, but over the years internal data as well as outside analyses contradicted that.
Only because of willful ignorance and blindness. In 2018 it was well-known from decades of study that standardized tests were the strongest predictor of student success, with a semi-objective HSGPA also a significant predictor (which relative to test scores has weakened considerably in recent years with rampant grade inflation afoot). The evidence has strengthened since, with no need of internal studies to have figured out that.
No, that wasn’t the real reason LSU went in this direction, nor why it has semi-reversed course. Then, the genuine reason was wokeness, driven by Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards who by the time this happened had appointed a majority to the Board reflecting his views receptive to the caterwauling of the political left decrying underrepresentation of non-Asians in higher education and claiming standardized testing was an instrument of discrimination in this regard. He was aided and abetted by the former system Pres. F. King Alexander who championed the standards dilution as a response to what he later alleged as institutional racism on campus (while ignoring larger concerns that would end his academic administrative career).
It's changing now because of two things: the semi-recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that disallowed use of race in almost all higher education admissions decisions – and sharpened when recently Republican Gov. Jeff Landry ordered an investigation into whether any state higher education institutions or governing bodies have adhered to that – and because a majority of Board appointees now are there because of Landry. Saying the watered-down change has come because of “new” research is an attempt to save face, to obscure that politics drove the initial decision and now conditions have changed to make that position untenable.
However, this milquetoast adjustment obviously needs shoring up. With his remaining appointments to this Board and all others in state higher education, Landry needs to ensure that put in place are individuals who don’t elevate fad and social engineering above the true purpose of higher education, developing knowledgeable critical thinkers, which increasingly as its mission has become subordinated to indoctrination and sociopolitical agendas. Simultaneously, the Board must return to the 2018 policy (if not increase the testing standard), which still would give unadmitted students to LSU enormous choices among other schools, so that LSU truly can act as a flagship institution for the state.
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