Science: requiring SAT scores both decreases and increases diversity at a university

From the haters at Fox News… “Top DEI staff at public universities pocket massive salaries as experts question motives of initiatives”:

A review of salary data shows that the universities of Michigan, Maryland, Virginia and Illinois, plus Virginia Tech, boast some of the highest-paid DEI staffers at public universities, a Fox News review found. These institutions’ top diversity employees earn salaries ranging from $329,000 to $430,000 – vastly eclipsing the average pay for the schools’ full-time tenured professors.

Fox implicitly considers Comparative Victimhood to be simpler than Quantum Electrodynamics and, therefore, it is not reasonable for a diversity bureaucrat to get paid 5X what a young Physics professor earns (see AIP salary calculator).

But what if Fox is wrong(!). From state-sponsored NPR in 2018… “Study: Colleges That Ditch The SAT And ACT Can Enhance Diversity”:

Colleges that have gone “test optional” enroll — and graduate — a higher proportion of low-income and first generation-students, and more students from diverse backgrounds, the researchers found in the study

In short, Science proves that dispensing with the SAT leads to more diversity.

What if we head over to a school where you can’t spit in the hallways without hitting a Scientist? “We are reinstating our SAT/ACT requirement for future admissions cycles in order to help us continue to build a diverse and talented MIT” (2022):

Within our office, we have a dedicated research and analysis team that continuously studies our processes, outcomes, and criteria …. not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education,⁠ relative to having them, given these other inequalities

There are some helpful hashtags, including #diversity:

When we combine NPR and MIT we find that Science proves that requiring the SAT reduces diversity and also that requiring the SAT increases diversity. It is therefore not unreasonable for someone tasked with applying this Science to earn $430,000 per year at a taxpayer-funded state university.

17 thoughts on “Science: requiring SAT scores both decreases and increases diversity at a university

  1. Isn’t this reflecting supply / demand ? The demand for talented DEI staff is exceeding supply. While the supply of those skilled at solving differential equations or teaching others to do so is exceeding demand.

    In any case, it appears Kurt Vonnegut was ahead of his time,

    HARRISON BERGERON
    by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
    Publication date 1961

    The Handicapper General’s agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear “handicaps”: masks for those who are too beautiful, loud radios that disrupt thoughts inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

  2. I prefer using the acronym “DIE”, instead of “DEI”, when talking about their cult.

  3. For a school like MIT, filling the “diversity” slots is probably not that challenging since MIT will cream off the high IQ minorities with a technical bent. There is probably more of a challenge for schools like Michigan, Maryland, Virginia etc. since the pool of high IQ minorities is quite limited and after MIT, Harvard, Yale take their pick what is left is not all that academically able — see Charles Murray’s recent Two Truths About Race in America. So perhaps the race administrators at Maryland, Virginia Tech and so on earn their pay?

  4. SAT scores only predict academic success in the STEM fields. Low SATs can still earn 4.0 college GPAs in the social “sciences” and grievance study fields, where grades are awarded based on feelings.

  5. Measuring diversity is like quantum physics: both states can be true at the same time!

  6. Off topic , but of interest for realworlddivorce:

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10679871/Couples-told-wary-greedy-lawyers-no-fault-divorces-introduced.html

    “Couples should be wary of ‘greedy’ solicitors encouraging them to pursue a divorce as new laws come into force this week, a top lawyer has warned.

    From Wednesday, couples will no longer have to blame each other to break up a marriage.

    In the biggest shake-up for England’s divorce laws in nearly 50 years, just one member of a marriage will be able to file for divorce without giving a reason.”

  7. The Science of DEI is both new and sophisticated. Questions that were simple in the past now have layers of nuance that only a DEI expert can address.

    For example, suppose you are the CMO of the NYC Health Department, and you want to understand what your department can do about infant mortality. It turns out that the correct analysis is to compare mortality rates for “Black and Puerto Rican Mothers” to those of “non-Hispanic White birthing people.”

    https://mobile.twitter.com/NYCHealthCMO/status/1506708485332942867

    Identifying that as the correct comparison (and not, for example, accidentally including all Black birthing people, or restricting the analysis to just non-Hispanic White mothers) requires deep expertise in DEI. The complexity of the issues clearly justifies the salary.

  8. Same at $BigTech and most “open” source projects. When “open” source projects are generally finished (written by White and Asian males), new DEI opportunists move in and take over the governance.

    These are joined by the mediocre part of the old guard, who form an alliance with the DEI people to establish a reign of terror in the projects and sell themselves as leaders to companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM (RedHat).

    Intelligent developers are suppressed and can no longer contradict even on technical matters. Actual development stalls and the mediocre people invent issues to churn the code written by the silenced experts. Criticizing this as futile counts as a “code of conduct” offense.

    Basically Mao’s cultural revolution with clear financial incentives.

  9. “Requiring SAT scores both decreases and increases diversity at a university”

    Schrödinger’s SAT scores

  10. Well, it was all in embryo back in the 90’s at the law school I used to toil so diligently for, working for a female Dean. First it was the effort to support the special: “Assistant to the President for Diversity.” A new position, $85-100k per year job. Plus she goes to the Law School and gets her JD. Then those morph into Assistant Deanships. Using some complex formula of value, eventually the position increases in “value” to the University, becomes more prestigious with a bigger and more important title, and the salary goes up. Pretty soon they have to become a full Deanship that requires and Assistant Deanship and several other people in the higher Administration. Eventually you start talking to the President of the University and – most especially – the Executive Vice President of the University and you need a whole suite of offices. Finally you become an Assistant Provost or Vice Provost that oversees several Deans in each College, each with Assistant Deans, all with their own staffs. At the high end of HR Department’s value equation, you’re now making $400,000 a year, which is twice what the best tenured law school full professor makes.

    Or, if you decide to leave academia, you become a Circuit Court Judge. If you’re politically-minded you can parlay that career into a run for State Senate and then … the BIG TIME!

    Once you start laying the foundation, you have to build the rest of the building…then keep it going. Hey, listen, the parents and the government will keep paying the tuitions. This is what a modern university needs to function in the United States! Otherwise, U.S. News and World Report will downrank you, your applicant pool will turn into people who need both hands to count to five, and consist of people who have never read anything but the Cliffs Notes.

    It’s a perpetual motion machine, with the tuition increases and office space requirements and endowment money and federal money helping it along. You’ve got a victimhood industry to build! This has spin-offs in the “soft sciences” like Psychology and Sociology and also Career Services, various forms of consulting, and of course, it’s a great benefit to lawyers. Follow ALL the money.

    Fox News draws the fire because all these people have created a gravy train for each other and don’t want any of it exposed or shown to the hapless ‘Murican public who think: “This is just the cost of my daughter/son getting a good education so they can move out of my basement and won’t perish or wind up as Uber drivers.”

    • And Lo! 25 years or so later, we wind up with unbelievable paradoxes like:

      “Your Diversity people make more than the highest-paid tenured professor at the School of Engineering.”

      “Requiring SAT scores both decreases and increases diversity at a university.”

      It’s impossible to stop the metastasis until it kills the patient.

    • “shown to the hapless ‘Murican public who think: “This is just the cost of my daughter/son getting a good education so they can move out of my basement and won’t perish or wind up as Uber drivers.”

      Uber driver is respectable as they are doing real work. Dropping down the labor ladder a few rungs, we can form an SAT analogy,

      Q. Hunter Biden is to (alleged) strippers as (alleged) oligarch money is to _
      a) child support payments
      b) conspiracy theory
      c) don’t care
      d) never heard of Hunter Biden

  11. @Philg: > therefore, it is not reasonable for a diversity bureaucrat to get paid 5X what a young Physics professor earns.

    But who can argue with it? Listen, these people do the much more important work that the public understands. Who understands what a young physics professor really does?

    Let’s take, for example, one selected publication of a young (female, if I’m not mistaken, she does not offer pronouns) MIT Physics professor, like this one, Janet M. Conrad:

    http://www2.lns.mit.edu/~conrad/select6_18.pdf

    “Neutrino Interferometry for High-Precision Tests of Lorentz Symmetry with IceCube”

    https://icecube.wisc.edu/

    I’m sure that’s totally fascinating stuff to 0.00001% of the people on planet Earth, but how can it possibly compare with the popular appeal of the work someone does in Comparative Victimhood studies to eradicate Implicit Bias? You can’t put Janet M. Conrad on a morning TV show!

    IceCube!?!?! Isn’t that some kind of White Privileged Appropriation?

    • My apologies to Professor Conrad – my arithmetic is wrong. I’ll bet that out of approximately 7.9 billion people on Planet Earth, her paper is fascinating to at least 1/10,000 to 1/1,000 of them, or between 79 and 7,900 people worldwide. I’m sure it’s beautiful and fascinating work, but I’m afraid it’s a little obscure for TODAY with Hoda & Jenna unless she can work Diversity into it somehow.

    • Alex, finding violation of Lorentz symmetry would be a huge thing for humankind, both knowledge of the universe and future impossible now technology, if humankind survives different threats: tyranny, wars, fake sciences a-la DEI, self-destructive countercultures and other public and personal evil. Violation of Lorentz symmetry experiment would invalidate special relativity at small distances (neutrino interferometry ?) and may lead to quantum theory of gravity. This would be a huge leap for humans, comparable to relativity / quantum mechanics development. Everyone knows Einstein, Time magazine person of last millennium, a physics rock star.
      Who can name most famous DEI “academic”? DEI would destroy a few more lives, result in fewer people well educated and ready to pursue their dreams or having dreams at all and may help elect few more “Democrats” into the office and as a result soften US economy and erode US freedoms

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