The University of South Carolina in Columbia has received 30,985 applications to date for students hoping to start as freshmen in the fall of 2019. Of those, 21,290 have been offered admission, said Scott Verzyl, UofSC's associate vice president for enrollment management and dean of undergraduate admissions.

In order to help make those decisions, UofSC applied a new tool provided by the College Board, the same nonprofit organization that administers the SAT. The school was one of 50 across the country to pilot the Environmental Context Dashboard, which "allows colleges to incorporate a student’s school and environmental context into their admissions process," the organization says.

Not everyone has approved of its use.

Clemson is considering use of the dashboard beginning this year for its next admissions cycle. Schools that used it this year included Yale, Florida State, Michigan and Trinity, according to the company.

Environmental Context Dashboard indicates "overall disadvantage level"

The dashboard gives students a score from 1 to 100 encompassing their "overall disadvantage level" based on aggregated data on their neighborhood and high school. The College Board has not specified how much weight is given to different measures, but the score factors in things such as median family income in a student's area, poverty rate, percentage of vacant homes, percentage of adults with less than a four-year degree and unemployment.

Verzyl said UofSC is interested in increasing diversity, including admitting more first-generation college students, underrepresented minorities and people from various socioeconomic backgrounds. He saw the score as a way to help with this.

"We saw this tool as one way to get at that socioeconomic diversity," Verzyl said. "It is an additional tool we can look at to understand a student's context."

Clemson's director for undergraduate admissions, David Kuskowski, said Clemson is "engaged with The College Board" to be in the next wave of 150 schools to pilot the tool in 2019.

"How we will use it in our processes is as yet undetermined," Kuskowski said.

While there are other ways to approximate socioeconomic status of a student, such as looking at the percent of students receiving free and reduced lunch at their school, Verzyl said that does not say much about a specific student. The College Board score is more encompassing and brings the information down to the neighborhood level, Verzyl said. However, it does not factor in personal information on an individual student, so it is still an approximation.

There are other commercially available scoring tools, Verzyl said, but the College Board's dashboard is free for use by schools that are piloting it.

Verzyl said he was "optimistic" about the dashboard after using it for an admissions cycle. He said the dashboard was used during the holistic review of candidates when factors such as extracurricular activities are taken into account. It helps admissions officers understand what opportunities may have been available to a student.

The dashboard can help admissions officers understand if a student might have been unable to participate in activities colleges look for, Verzyl said. It might get officers thinking about whether a student had to choose between participating in an after-school organization or watching a sibling while a parent worked a second job, Verzyl said as a hypothetical.

Verzyl hopes to use the tool not only in admissions but to better understand students an what their needs may be once they reach campus. He said it was used mainly when considering in-state students; he said most students who look to attend UofSC from out of state are already advantaged if they can afford that option.

College Board dashboard is "slap in face to poor kids," activist says

April Few, the state leader for SC Parents Involved in Education, an activist group that aims to remove federal control over education, is skeptical of the tool and called it "socialist."

"It's a slap in the face to poor kids, saying poor kids can't learn and we have to help give them a break because they can't learn," Few said.

Others have also been critical of the tool. The Chicago Tribune's editorial board said the tool "merits a failing grade" and criticized the College Board for giving access only to colleges and not students.

Right now, only the universities piloting the dashboard can view it, so students do not know what disadvantage score the organization ascribed to them. The College Board said it is "looking into how we might make it available to them" in the future.

"The whole exercise smacks of false precision — it suggests that each student’s nonacademic background, measured by no personal data whatsoever, can be squeezed into one of 100 little boxes," the Tribune's editorial board wrote.

Verzyl said the way UofSC used the score was not to knock down qualified candidates but rather to admit candidates with "grit, determination and resilience."

"There is a worry on the part of some students that this will disadvantage the advantaged students; if you don't have a a high adversity score, a college won't admit you," Verzyl said. "I don't think that's the case for most colleges and universities in the U.S."

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