I came across this correction in Thursday’s New York Times. Forget about the original article, and just focus on this statistic:
An article on Wednesday about how the Trump administration will gain access to the standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants to Columbia and Brown University misstated the findings of an SAT report from the College Board. The report found that 1 percent of the African American high school graduates who took the SAT in 2024 scored between 1400 and 1600, the highest possible scores, and 27 percent of the Asian graduates scored at that level. It is not the case that, of all the high school graduates who scored between 1400 and 1600 in 2024, 1 percent were African American and 27 percent were Asian.
That is a remarkable discrepancy. If a selective college or university tries to admit students in proportion to their racial group’s population, or as close to that proportion as possible–which they nearly all do, or did until recently–enormous injustices must result.
The reality is that an 18-year-old applying to college doesn’t represent a racial group. He doesn’t represent anyone except himself. Universities, like employers, can only commit injustice if they treat people as representatives of groups, rather than as individuals.
