When it comes to college admissions, is the system rigged?

That’s the question posed by Nadirah Farah Foley in a recent piece for Pacific Standard mazagine. Foley, a Ph.D. student at Harvard University and former admissions officer, makes the case that our current admissions criteria overwhelmingly rewards students that come from affluent backgrounds.

Foley lays out a plan directed at evening the playing field, starting by hiring and training admissions officers to understand the larger social context of the college admissions process. She also suggests doing away with biased measurement tools such as the SAT.

Ultimately, she concludes, “if universities took up this challenge to think of themselves as producers of value, not arbiters of merit, universities could do much more to support marginalized students in applying to college.”