Anemona Hartocollis

Officials at ACT, which makes the exam, said Tuesday that starting next September, students who want to improve their scores would be able to retake single sections of the five-part test, which lasts about three hours, instead of sitting for all of them again. The change would allow students to avoid getting worse marks on sections they had taken earlier.

The new policy comes as educators, students and parents debate the role of standardized testing in admissions and whether it is an appropriate measure of student ability or worsens social inequities. Many colleges and universities have made test scores an optional part of applications. But many students still feel compelled to score highly on the ACT and SAT exams, committing to time-consuming and often costly prep sessions to gain an edge.

After the change was announced, some parents, students and tutors wondered if the option to focus their improvement efforts would fan the frenzy over test scores, putting students who do not have access to coaching at a further disadvantage.

The five subsections on the ACT — reading, math, science, English and writing, which is optional — are graded on a scale of 1 to 36. Currently, scores on the four required sections are averaged into a composite score. But students’ highest composite scores may not reflect their highest subscores because they may have done worse on an individual section.

Starting in September, students will get a new “superscore” combining their highest scores on the subsections from each time they took the test. Currently, if students who have taken the test more than once want colleges to see their best subscores, they have to send in multiple test results.

“They might think, ‘Why do I have to sit through and take all these tests again if I only need to improve my math score?’ ” an ACT spokesman, Ed Colby, said. “We’re trying to save them time. We’re trying to save them money.”

It is not yet clear whether colleges would evaluate applicants with a superscore over multiple exams differently from those with a composite score from one exam.

Test experts said the changes would help many students improve their lots. Testing coaches now generally work with students on the entire test. Under the new rules, they would be able to work on one subject at a time, trying to raise a score in math, for example, before moving on to English or science.

But the ability to customize test results in this way could make test prep even more important than it is now, hurting those who cannot afford it or are not advised to seek it, said Sally Rubenstone, senior contributor at College Confidential, an online admissions forum.

“These ‘improvements’ don’t move the admissions process any closer to the destination that I recommend, which is not eliminating tests entirely, but downgrading their importance and allowing only one — or maybe two — test sessions per student,” Rubenstone said.

“I worry that most of the high-achieving kids in my orbit will retest and retest until they can bump subsections of 33 and 34 up to 35 and 36. So standardized testing will become even more of an extracurricular activity than it already is.”

Akil Bello, a college consultant who specializes in working with underprivileged students, said that although the changes sounded positive, “in the world we live in, it advantages the rich, who have coaches, who have advisers, who are strategically crafting their plan to take them to college.”

Another admissions consultant, Joshua Mauro, of Signet Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said he thought superscoring would primarily benefit the ACT, by encouraging students to take its exam instead of the rival SAT. It would also help colleges, he added, by allowing them to report better test scores for students they admitted.

He said several colleges already constructed their own superscores, based on the test results that students send them, because “it improves their standing, their metrics.”

But he said that being able to retake individual subsections would be beneficial to students nevertheless. Just the stress and fatigue of taking a multi-hour test can reduce scores, so taking just part of it would mitigate that, he said.

“In my experience, students taking individual sections do drastically better than when they sit for the full exam,” Mauro said. “I see that as a way to reduce anxiety.”

The ACT says its research shows that superscoring is more predictive of how students will perform in their college courses than other scoring methods.

Kent Rinehart, dean of admission at Marist College, said his office informally superscores now because it wants to present students in the most favorable light, even though test scores are optional there. But he said admissions officers would have to consider whether it was fair to compare the superscores of students who retook the whole test with those of students who retook just part of it.

“I think we’re going to have to take a step back and think about whether the way we superscore today is the way we’re going to superscore it in the future,” Rinehart said. “It would not surprise me if we took a slightly different approach.”

Students can take the test up to 12 times, though most take it only once or twice. According to the ACT, students who take the test more than once have slightly higher first-year college grades than those who take the test a single time. The organization’s theory is that those students are motivated to succeed, which translates into better academic performance.

Taking the whole test costs $52 without the optional writing section, and $68 with it. ACT officials said taking an individual section would be cheaper, but they had not yet decided on a price.

If the change encourages more students to retake portions of the exam, it may ultimately increase revenue for the organization.

Students will also be given the option to take the ACT online, rather than with paper and pencil, on days when it is administered nationwide. The test is now given online only at international test centers and in school districts that administer the test during the school day.

Online results will be available within two business days, rather than the two to eight weeks it takes to get results from the paper-and-pencil tests.

For years, the two dominant test makers, ACT and the College Board, which administers the SAT, have been in a battle for market share. About 1.9 million students take the ACT each year; about 2.1 million take the SAT.

Several experts said the ACT announcement would put pressure on the College Board to make similar changes to the SAT, which has two sections — math and evidence-based reading and writing. Officials at the College Board, which recently withdrew a plan to measure disadvantage with a single number on a test-taker’s score report, did not return a request for comment on Tuesday.

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ACT Will Allow Students to Retake Sections of Test

High school students will find the intense pressure to present their best efforts on the ACT exam a bit easier next year as they buckle down to the competitive college admissions process.

But as the changes were announced Tuesday, some parents, student and tutors wondered if they would fan the frenzy over test scores, further disadvantaging students who did not have access to coaching.

Officials at ACT, which makes the exam, said Tuesday that starting next September, students would be able to retake specific sections rather than the entire test, which lasts about three hours.

The change would allow students to avoid getting a worse grade on a section they had scored well on earlier. Although a growing number of colleges and universities have made test scores an optional part of college applications, many high schoolers feel pressure to score highly on the ACT and SAT exams.

There are five subsections on the ACT — reading, math, science, English and writing, which is optional — graded on a scale of 1 to 36. Scores on the four required sections are averaged into a composite score. But a student’s highest composite score may not necessarily include the highest subscores if they were achieved on a test with a lower composite score.

Starting in September, students will get a new “superscore” that combines their highest scores on the subsections from the different times they took the test. Currently, if students who have taken the test more than once want colleges to see their best subscores, they have to send in multiple test results.

“They might think, ‘Why do I have to sit through and take all these tests again if I only need to improve my math score?” said Ed Colby, an ACT spokesman. “We’re trying to save them time. We’re trying to save them money.”

Test experts said that the changes would probably allow many students to up their game. Testing coaches now generally work with students on the entire test. Under the new rules, they would be able to serially work on one subject at a time, trying to boost a student’s score in math, before moving on to English or science, experts said.

But the ability to tweak test results in this way could make test prep even more important than it is now, disadvantaging those who cannot afford it or are not advised to seek it out, said Sally Rubenstone, senior contributor at College Confidential, a college admissions and advice sharing online forum.

Akil Bello, a college consultant who specializes in working with under-resourced and underprivileged students, said that while being able to retake individual sections of the test sounded “lovely,” “in the world we live in, it advantages the rich, who have coaches, who have advisers, who are strategically crafting their plan to take them to college.”

Another admissions consultant, Joshua Mauro, of Signet Education Cambridge, Massachusetts, said he thought that super-scoring would primarily benefit the ACT, by inducing students to take it instead of the rival SAT, and colleges, by allowing them to publicly display better test scores.

He said that a number of schools already construct their own superscores, based on the test results that students send them, because “it improves their standing, their metrics.”

But he said that being able to retake individual subsections would be beneficial to students. Just the stress and fatigue of taking a multihour test can reduce scores, so taking just part of it would mitigate that, he said.

The company also says that ACT scores for students who take individual section tests are consistent with those earned when they take the entire test.

“We are simply offering new ways to take the ACT, saving students time and giving them the ability to focus only on subject areas needing improvement,” the ACT said in a statement announcing the changes.

It is not clear whether colleges would evaluate applicants with the same test score differently if one acquired the score in a single sitting and one had a superscore. Some colleges already do their own superscoring, combining a student’s highest section scores across multiple test dates. But until now, the ACT had not provided an official superscore.

Students can take the test up to 12 times, though most take it only once or twice. According to the ACT, research shows that students who take the test more than once have slightly higher first-year college grades than those who take the test a single time. The organization’s theory is that those students are motivated to succeed, which translates into better academic performance.

If the change encourages more students to retake portions of the exam, it may increase revenue for the organization.

“It’s all about what works best for them individually,” Colby said.

The changes come amid rising doubts about the value of standardized testing and competition for market share between the two dominant test makers, ACT and the College Board, which administers the SAT. About 1.9 million students a year take the ACT, and about 2.1 million take the SAT.

Standardized tests have been criticized for score differences among groups of students that correlate with race, family income and education levels of parents. White and Asian American students perform better than other groups, as do students from higher-income families with educated parents.

But after criticism from parents and educators, the College Board recently withdrew its plan to measure student disadvantage with a single number on the SAT, which became known as the adversity score.

ACT Change Will Allow Students to Retake Individual Sections

High schoolers will find it easier next year to submit a high ACT exam score as part of the competitive college admissions process.

But from the beginning, the plaintiffs suing Harvard were preparing for a Supreme Court challenge that could overturn decades of precedent and outlaw affirmative action in college admissions. Harvard’s win, which upheld existing law, only makes the challenge more likely, some experts said.

“It is now on the fast track to the Supreme Court because now the Supreme Court can say we want to reverse the old law,” said Derek W. Black, a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina. “You wouldn’t take it just to say, ‘Hey, you got the facts wrong.’”

The judge, Allison D. Burroughs, seemed to anticipate the road ahead when she spent nine pages of her 130-page ruling discussing the history of Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, from the first in 1978 to the most recent in 2016. The decision took her almost a year after the trial to deliver.

“I think she wrestled and struggled with it,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “But I think she has it right, given precedent and the evidence.”

More than 40 years after the Supreme Court first weighed in on a high-stakes dispute over affirmative action in college admissions — permitting the consideration of race but striking down explicit quotas — the dispute has grown only more fractious.

Other lawsuits related to race-conscious admissions are pending. Edward Blum, the longtime foe of affirmative action who orchestrated the Harvard case, is waging a separate legal battle against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over its admissions process. A trial in that case is expected next year.

Richard Sander, an academic who has been critical of affirmative action, is suing the University of California system for admissions data, which he says could reveal whether the system has secretly reintroduced race into admissions decisions, setting the stage for a showdown there. (California has banned affirmative action in colleges and universities since 1996.)

The battle has also spread beyond the reaches of the courtroom.

The Justice Department has opened investigations into admissions practices at Harvard and at Yale. In Washington state, voters will decide with a ballot measure in November whether to keep affirmative action at public colleges. And race-neutral alternatives for promoting diversity have been gaining sway, like the effort by the College Board to include the socioeconomic backgrounds — but not the race — of students with their SAT scores.

But the multipronged efforts by Blum, and his group Students for Fair Admissions, have in recent years been the most visible in the quest to dismantle race-conscious policies used by elite colleges across the country.

“It makes clear that this is a coordinated campaign that’s underway, that his endpoint is the U.S. Supreme Court, and that he’s applying every pressure point,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Blum was behind the last affirmative action admissions case to reach the Supreme Court, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which was decided in 2016 and upheld a race-conscious admissions program at the state’s flagship university. But that decision was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote who has since been replaced by President Donald Trump’s more conservative pick, Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Many have pointed out that the newly constituted Supreme Court may be more receptive to banning race-conscious admissions than it has been in years. There is a five-member conservative majority, and Chief Justice John Roberts sided with conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to dissent in the 4-3 Fisher case.

Roberts wrote the opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, a 2013 decision that gutted a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. That case was sponsored by Blum.

If Burroughs found Harvard’s policies weak in any area, it may have been on the question of whether implicit bias was a factor in the admissions process. She said it was conceivable that the unintentional biases of admissions officers, and of guidance counselors and teachers who write student recommendations, could affect the process. But the effects were very slight, she added, and “while regrettable, cannot be completely eliminated in a process that must rely on judgments about individuals.”

“We used to be concerned when you had explicit bias, which is demonstrated by Brown v. Board,” Tobias said of the 1954 Supreme Court case outlawing racially segregated schools. “But the idea of implicit bias is that they’re still lingering and people may not even know it. Just by living in this society, they have acquired biases, specially against minorities.”

Burroughs did not buy the plaintiffs’ statistical analysis arguing that Harvard’s more subjective admissions measures were prone to stereotyping, but suggested that Harvard could do a better job of guarding against implicit bias. “It may offer them an opening to make that argument on appeal,” Tobias said.

He said it was more likely, however, that the plaintiffs would focus on overturning precedent going back to Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which in 1978 became the first case to uphold race-conscious admissions but outlawed racial quotas.

Burroughs found that there was no smoking gun of discrimination. “The statistics themselves are alone not enough,” she said. “In other words, although the statistics perhaps tell ‘what,’ they do not tell ‘why,’ and here the ‘why’ is critically important.”

She said the testimony from admissions officers that there was no discrimination against Asian-American applicants was “consistent, unambiguous and convincing.” It was likely, she said, that the plaintiffs’ statistical analysis was flawed and the Asian-American penalty was overstated.

She faulted the plaintiffs for not putting any Asian-American applicants on the witness stand to testify about how they were discriminated against. (The plaintiffs said they did this to protect the students from harassment.)

One way for the Supreme Court to overturn race-conscious admissions would be to tackle the issue of how much diversity is enough, Black said. The high court could say, “Look, we think what they can achieve without considering race is enough diversity, and therefore the consideration of race is unnecessary,” he said.

Even though Blum lost at trial, Black added, he made some strategic choices in garnering publicity by focusing on a high-profile defendant, Harvard, and a sensational narrative — that it was keeping out Asian Americans.

“You bet your bottom dollar that every member of the Supreme Court was reading that decision last night or this morning,” he said, “because there was so much narrative that’s been built around it.”

Harvard Won a Key Affirmative Action Battle. But the War's Not Over.

The bitter fight over Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process — and affirmative action nationwide — is far from done. The university won the first round on Tuesday, when a federal judge ruled there was no evidence of explicit bias in Harvard’s treatment of Asian-American applicants.

The lawsuit against the university came from a group hoping to overturn a long-standing Supreme Court precedent that allows race to be considered as one factor among many in admissions, but prohibits universities from using racial quotas.

The group argued that Harvard had favored black and Hispanic applicants at the expense of another minority group — a strategic reversal of past affirmative action lawsuits in which the plaintiff complained that white students had been treated unfairly.

The judge, Allison D. Burroughs, rejected the plaintiff’s argument, and said that the university met the strict constitutional standard for considering race in its admissions process.

In her decision, Burroughs defended the benefits of diversity, saying it was not yet time to look beyond race in college admissions. “Diversity,” she wrote, “will foster the tolerance, acceptance and understanding that will ultimately make race conscious admissions obsolete.”

The case drew widespread scrutiny, including from dozens of other top-ranked colleges that expressed their support in court filings, and from the Justice Department, which backed the plaintiff and is pursuing its own investigation. The decision will be appealed and is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court.

The plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions, represents a group of Asian-American students rejected by Harvard. Led by Edward Blum, a conservative activist who waged previous battles against affirmative action, the students accused the college of violating federal civil rights law by holding Asian Americans, who as a group get better test scores and grades than other races, to a higher standard. Harvard did this, they said, in part by downgrading applications from Asian Americans based on a subjective rating system that was vulnerable to stereotyping.

Students for Fair Admissions made four interrelated claims: that Harvard intentionally discriminated against Asian Americans; that it used race as a predominant factor in admissions decisions; that it racially balanced its classes; and that it had considered applicants’ race without first exhausting race-neutral alternatives to create diversity. Burroughs cleared the university of all four claims.

Still, she said that Harvard’s admissions process was “not perfect.”

The judge suggested that Harvard could do more to guard against the unconscious biases of admissions officers, echoing an argument that the plaintiff made at trial. She noted more explicit guidelines on using race that were developed for the officers during the litigation, and said the officers could also be made aware of significant statistical disparities related to race.

These criticisms are likely to drive a review of admissions at schools across the country, to make sure they are not vulnerable to the same suggestions.

Despite the imperfections, she said, the court would not tear down “a very fine admissions program that passes constitutional muster, solely because it could do better.”

In an email, Larry Bacow, Harvard’s president, credited Harvard students who testified during the trial with vividly making the case for diversity through their own stories. “The power of American higher education stems from a devotion to learning from our differences,” he said. “Affirming that promise will make our colleges, and our society, stronger still.”

Other universities breathed sighs of relief when the decision came out. “We are gratified that this decision unambiguously respects more than four decades of U.S. Supreme Court precedent,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, a trade group, said in a statement on Tuesday.

But they also recognized that the federal court ruling, while important, is just a step along the way and is far from the final say in the case.

Blum has filed additional challenges to affirmative action against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in federal court and the University of Texas at Austin in state court.

The Harvard case raised powerful issues of class, race and power in American society. Critics of the university admissions process said it showed how the white establishment was afraid of losing its dominance to another racial group. Defenders said that while it might be flawed, the Harvard system tried to forge a more perfect society.

Harvard admissions officers pointed out that they could fill the freshman class with students with perfect test scores if they wanted to, and that figuring out which apparently highly qualified students to reject was a delicate, difficult balance.

Burroughs noted in her ruling that Asian American applicants were accepted to Harvard at the same rate as other applicants and now made up more than 20% of the admitted class, even though Asian Americans made up about 6% of the U.S. population.

Some students on Harvard’s campus said they were pleased with the decision, although they said they were apprehensive about what would happen if the case made it to the Supreme Court.

“Honestly for me, the overwhelming feeling is fear or a little bit of anxiety,” said Andrew Ham, 19, a sophomore from South Korea. “What I’m afraid of is affirmative action or race-conscious admissions being struck down nationwide.”

Zeel Patel, a sophomore who is Indian-Canadian, said that he disagreed with the judge’s decision, and that he hoped the Supreme Court would ultimately put a check on Harvard’s use of race in admissions.

“We all agree that diversity is important, but it’s more so like the means by which we actually get to the diversity,” he said.

The trial unveiled many secrets of Harvard’s arcane admissions process. There was testimony about a “Dean’s List” of students who were earmarked for special consideration because of their wealth and connections; about lowering the SAT requirements for white students in “sparse country,” rural areas where few applicants applied to Harvard; about how recruited athletes and the children of alumni and faculty received large preferences, and about how admissions officers from Ivy League schools got together every year to compare notes on admissions by race.

The Harvard trial contributed to a populist backlash against elite colleges that snowballed in the spring, when federal prosecutors accused 50 people of participating in a scheme by wealthy families to bribe their children’s way into schools like Stanford and Yale.

The trial was steeped in statistical evidence and terminology that spectators often struggled to understand. In the end, the judge’s 130-page decision was not overly seduced by statistics. But she sided more often than not with Harvard’s expert, David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

She rejected the argument that “tips,” or admissions advantages, received by some black and Hispanic students were unfair. While some racial groups did receive tips, she said, “most Harvard students from every racial group have a roughly similar level of academic potential” despite significant differences in their SAT scores and grades.

The plaintiff had failed, she said, to counter Harvard’s argument that race-neutral admissions schemes, like admitting students based on where they lived, would lead to a decline in qualified black and Hispanic students.

The trial was painful for many Asian Americans, a group that overwhelmingly supports affirmative action but includes many people who feel they have been stereotyped in admissions.

Lee C. Cheng, a founder and director of the Asian American Legal Foundation, said he was concerned and surprised by the extent of the judge’s support for Harvard’s policy, which he viewed as racist.

“I think the data showed Harvard racially stereotyped a group of Americans who are supposed to have the same rights to be free from the stigma of racial classification,” Cheng said.

Others disagreed, and denounced the plaintiff’s efforts. Bhargavi Garimella, 18, a freshman from California who applauded the judge’s decision, said she was upset by how Blum had involved Asian Americans in his quest to end affirmative action.

“I was really uncomfortable with the idea of Asian-Americans as a whole being used,” she said, adding, “Taking down affirmative action would be detrimental to all people of color.”

In her decision, Burroughs imagined a future in which race would no longer be needed in admissions. She quoted the novelist Toni Morrison, who died in August, saying that “race is the least reliable information you can have about someone.”

But Morrison’s words, the judge said, had to “become accepted and understood before we close the curtain on race conscious admissions policies.”

Judge Rules in Harvard's Favor on Asian-Americans and Race

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected claims that Harvard had intentionally discriminated against Asian American applicants, in a closely watched case that presented one of the biggest legal challenges to affirmative action in years.

The challenge to the university’s admissions process came from a group hoping to overturn a long-standing Supreme Court precedent that allows race to be considered as one factor among many, but prohibits universities from using quotas in admissions.

The judge, Allison Burroughs, rejected the argument that Harvard was using affirmative action as a weapon against some races and a boon to others, and said that the university met the strict judicial standard for considering race in its admissions process.

In her decision, Burroughs gave an eloquent defense of the benefits of diversity, and said that while the time might come when it would be possible to look beyond race in college admissions, that time was not yet here.

“For purposes of this case, at least for now, ensuring diversity at Harvard relies, in part, on race conscious admissions,” the judge said. “The students who are admitted to Harvard and choose to attend will live and learn surrounded by all sorts of people, with all sorts of experiences, beliefs and talents. They will have the opportunity to know and understand one another beyond race, as whole individuals with unique histories and experiences. It is this, at Harvard and elsewhere that will move us, one day, to the point where we see that race is a fact, but not the defining fact and not the fact that tells us what is important, but we are not there yet.”

The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit representing a group of Asian-American students rejected by Harvard, had accused the college of violating federal civil rights law by holding Asian-Americans, who as a group get better test scores and grades than other races, to a higher standard.

The three-week trial last October set off a national discussion about the role of race and ethnicity in college admissions. It led to sometimes bitter debate over whether the college admissions system was a beacon of meritocracy or a system that privileged some groups — like the children of alumni, wealthy donors and certain minorities — while penalizing others.

Harvard Does Not Discriminate Against Asian-Americans in Admissions, Judge Rules

A federal judge has rejected claims that Harvard discriminated against Asian-Americans in admissions, saying that the university had a right to choose a diverse class.

Mary Jane Karger and her husband, Tom, both 74, have put down a 10% deposit on a retirement community to be built on 40 acres of the 500-acre Purchase College campus, a former cattle farm that is now part of the State University of New York.

Purchase is one of a growing number of colleges sponsoring retirement communities on campus or thinking about it. It is a marketer’s dream, monetizing spare land, while milking the baby boom generation’s affluence by appealing to their obsession with staying forever young.

“I don’t know how much students in their late teens and 20s want to talk to people in their 70s,” said Mary Jane Karger, a retired school social worker who plans to live there. “I kind of like to think that they would.”

The schools say their motive is more educational and social — encouraging intergenerational mixing — than financial. But the communities promise a new revenue stream for institutions that are coping with reduced state operating support and declining college enrollment in many parts of the country. They are bringing a new generation (or old generation) to campus to fill classes, eat in dining halls, attend student performances and become mentors.

“Look at the whole demographic issue, tuition debt and how states have defunded higher education,” said Tom Schwarz, who recently retired as president of Purchase College. “So the result of that is tuition is going up, the need for scholarships is going up. So it’s like well-working gears. It sort of fits together.”

Retirees who are happy to be living on campus, including alumni and faculty members, could become a fertile source of fundraising. “We don’t expect 100% of the people to contribute, but in a sense, they’re contributing just by living there,” Schwarz said.

Many students have mixed feelings about sharing their college years with people who remind them of the parents and grandparents whose orbit they have just escaped.

Anton Creutzfeldt, a junior at Purchase College, worried that older people would object to noise and late-night partying. “It’s an interesting idea, but we struggle already on campus to have it feel like a college, because there’s not that much of an outlet for recreational stuff,” he said.

Creutzfeldt said he had been in classes that were audited by old people, and their presence changed the atmosphere. “Obviously, an older person taking the class doesn’t really care if they pass or fail,” Creutzfeldt said. “They’re taking it for the enjoyment, or the desire to learn. It creates a difference in the objective in class. An older person will go on a tangent about something because it’s interesting to them, or they have personal experience with it, while everyone else is just trying to get through the lecture.”

The Kargers, on the other hand, resist the old-fogey stereotype. They say the whole reason they are moving to Purchase College and not to Miami is that they like to stay up late and party. Mary Jane Karger believes the other residents will be the same — not your parents’ grandparents. “They’re forward thinkers, not the ones to go down to Florida and order the early bird special,” she said.

Other students said they might like having surrogate grandparents on campus. Annie Yang, a senior majoring in economics at the University of Chicago, said she had basically been raised by her grandmother while her parents were working. She said she could see herself living with old people on campus, especially if she got a break on housing fees in return.

“Grannies are my weakness,” she said. “I feel there is a not-trivial population of people like me who have a connection to old people and wouldn’t mind a discount on housing.”

The retirement housing at Purchase, expected to be ready in about three years, will be open to anyone 62 and older; the median age of those who have put down deposits is 77.

The complex will start with about 220 apartments and houses, plus a sprinkling of assisted living and memory-care beds, and can expand to 385 units.

Arizona State University is working on a similar project on its campus in Tempe that is scheduled to open next spring. Its high-rise development of 252 apartments is nearly sold out.

Other schools are following suit. Kendal, a nonprofit organization that supports a network of retirement communities, is in talks with the University of Pennsylvania and another major university about putting retirement housing on their campuses, according to Larry Elveru, a spokesman for Kendal.

Lasell Village, a pioneering retirement community on the campus of Lasell University outside Boston, is providing consulting services to other universities, senior living organizations and developers, said Anne Doyle, the village president, who is a university employee.

Marketing for these projects focuses on the academic angle. Arizona State officials avoid the word retirement, preferring to talk about “independent lifelong learners.” Purchase is calling its development an “intergenerational senior learning community.”

Administrators envision a two-way street, in which older people with experience as doctors, lawyers or musicians become mentors to students, and students use the retirement community as a lab for internship work in, say, gerontology or art therapy.

To encourage cross-generational mingling, Arizona is adopting Yang’s model, inviting some performing arts students to live at no cost in the same apartment building as the older residents, in exchange for sharing their talents with the residents in some way.

“We thought there was an awful lot to be learned about the aging population in today’s world, and how people want to continue to learn all their lives,” said Todd Hardy, managing director of innovations zones at Arizona State.

At Lasell Village, created in 2000, the residents live in 16 interconnected buildings, like houses on a college campus, that are named after educators like Margaret Mead and John Dewey.

Residents are required to take college classes, with tuition included in their monthly fees. One of the most popular this fall is a social justice class, whose enrollment is half students and half residents. The retirement community, in turn, provides internships and employment for students, as well as income for the university from rent and payment for support services like information technology and security.

“Just from a business perspective, it’s a very strong enterprise,” said Doyle, the president of the community.

Purchase and Arizona State will give student ID cards to their older residents, and say they are working out the details of how much access to campus amenities the residents will be offered.

At Purchase, residents and students will take short courses together, because research has shown that most retirees had little interest in full-length courses. And a student performance space is being built within the retirement complex.

The New York Legislature approved the long-term lease of state land for the project in 2011, and Purchase College set up a nonprofit organization to develop it with a private operator, at a projected cost of $320 million. Officials are expecting a base of $2 million in annual rental income, to be used to almost double the college’s $1.8 million scholarship fund and to hire new faculty members.

At a recent marketing session for the Purchase project, called Broadview Senior Living, Ashley Wade, the project’s marketing director, gave a hard sell to about 25 potential buyers.

“You don’t have to go to class,” Wade said. “You just get to go to class.”

Many of the listeners were in sticker shock. The Purchase College “entrance fee” ranges from $595,000 for an apartment to $1,995,000 for a small house; monthly services fees range from $4,300 to $8,700 for one resident and $1,500 more for a second person. When the unit is vacated, 90% of the entrance fee is refundable to the residents or their heirs. One-fifth of the units are reserved for people with incomes at or below 80% of the median income for Westchester County; for them, the entrance fees start at $250,000.

Prices at Arizona State’s project, called Mirabella, range from the mid-$300,000s to more than $1 million for a penthouse apartment.

Judy Cohen, 82, a retired English teacher, and her husband, Martin, 84, a cardiologist, wondered whether they would be welcomed by the students.

“The students have their own life,” Martin Cohen said. “I don’t know how many would want to come and sit with. ... ” As his voice trailed off, his wife picked up the thread: “Old people,” she said. “Let’s put the word out there.”

Yes, This Actually Is Your Grandparents' Campus

College is a place to escape parental oversight for many new arrivals. But a growing trend on college campuses — to place retirement homes near the dorms — may one day prompt students to ask: “Is that grandma over there on the quad?”

The adversity score was made up of the average of two ratings between 1 and 100 — one for the student’s school environment and the other for the student’s neighborhood environment — that indicate the obstacles a student might have overcome, like crime and poverty. The school and neighborhood scores will still be provided to admissions officers, along with other socioeconomic information.

The change was made after a storm of criticism from parents and educators followed the announcement of the plan last spring. Many of them said it falsely suggested that a student’s achievements and challenges could be quantified as the math and verbal scores on the SAT are.

The tool was officially introduced this year and is being used by about 100 to 150 colleges and universities this fall, the College Board said. The company had plans to roll it out more widely next year.

David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board, said Tuesday that the board had heard the criticism and was bowing to it. He said that the company had always believed that students should be judged by more than a number, whether a test score or a disadvantage score, and that admissions officers should also consider context like personal essays, teacher recommendations and family background.

“I think it is a retreat from the notion that a single score is better,” Coleman said. “So in that sense, we’ve adopted a humbler position. That’s admitting that the College Board should keep its focus on scoring achievement. We have acknowledged that we have perhaps overstepped.”

The score was part of a larger rating system called the Environmental Context Dashboard that was provided to admissions officers along with a student’s SAT scores.

In addition to eliminating the single hardship score, the College Board changed the name of the dashboard tool to “Landscape” and said that after this admissions cycle, the board would begin reporting school and neighborhood disadvantage scores to students and families. That information is currently shown only to admissions officers — another aspect of the system that drew public criticism.

The College Board has also reduced the number of factors that are considered as part of the school or neighborhood score, and will list those factors on the reports.

Coleman defended the overall goal of the project, which he said was to provide colleges with a consistent way of judging the neighborhoods and schools that students came from. Admissions officers lack high school information on about 25% of applications, according to the College Board, and the new tool is filling that gap. “It isn’t a retreat from the notion that it isn’t about who knows you, or who knows you and your neighborhood, or where you grew up,” he said.

The adversity score was announced in May and immediately became part of the debate over the fairness of college admissions. In the past year, federal prosecutors exposed a national college admissions cheating ring, in which wealthy parents were accused of paying bribes to have their children’s test and sports credentials falsified. Affirmative action is facing court challenges at Harvard and other elite colleges.

Richard Kahlenberg, an education expert at the Century Foundation, said the single adversity score did not capture the most important factor of student disadvantage: the income and education level of their parents. So he considered the change an improvement, even though people could simply average the neighborhood and school scores and still come up with the number.

Kaplan Test Prep found mixed reactions to the adversity score in a recent survey of college admissions officers. Sam Pritchard, its director of college preparation programs, said the decision to report the school and neighborhood scores to students would help preserve faith in the college admissions process.

College Board Rethinks SAT 'Adversity Score' After Criticism

The College Board, the company that administers the SAT exam, said Tuesday that it would withdraw its much-debated plan to include a so-called adversity score on student test results, saying it had erred in distilling the challenges faced by college applicants to a single number.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren this week laid out one of the most ambitious plans yet, promising free public college and debt clearance for the majority of student loan holders. Cost: $1.25 trillion over 10 years, billed to the ultrawealthy.

The announcement from Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who is running for president, had many students and former students cheering. It also raised long-simmering questions about the cost and quality of higher education, and who should pay for it.

Warren’s plan would offer a one-time clearance of student debt for 75 percent of borrowers, and at least some relief for 42 million Americans. It would cancel $640 billion of the $1.5 trillion in outstanding student debt.

For Samantha Morgan and her husband, Justin, the plan would be life-changing. He works as a laboratory manager, and she works part time for a nonprofit. They said they had accrued about $70,000 in student loan debt between them and are making payments on an income-based repayment plan.

“Your monthly payment is so low that you’re not paying your loans because interest accrues so fast,” Samantha Morgan, 30, said. “My loan has actually gotten bigger.”

If they faithfully make their payments for 20 years, the loans would be forgiven. The couple, who have a 3-year-old son, said they could not afford to buy a house and were reluctant to have another child, in part because of their debt burden.

The Morgans are precisely the kind of people that Warren’s proposal is meant to help. But one criticism of the plan, and of other candidates’ ideas to eliminate college tuition or student debt, is that it would benefit some on the road to becoming doctors, lawyers and other well-paid professionals.

The Warren campaign said that the plan was designed both to capture a wide swath of borrowers and to target those who need it most. Its payouts are progressive, canceling up to $50,000 for every person with a household income under $100,000, but gradually declining for households with incomes up to $250,000. Those who make more than $250,000 would get nothing.

Still, to Sandy Baum, an expert on college affordability at the Urban Institute, $50,000 in debt clearance was too much. Forgiving $10,000 in loans would eliminate debt for a third of borrowers, she said.

“That is virtually all the borrowers who are low-income, who don’t have a bachelor’s degree, who dropped out of college, who are struggling most,” as opposed to those who are in a better position to pay off their loans, Baum said. The average federal student loan debt is $32,000, according to federal data.

An Urban Institute analysis found that the loan cancellation plan would benefit black students — who on average borrow more for college — more than other racial and ethnic groups. Warren campaign officials said the plan was meant to address the fact that black students tend to have fewer family assets to draw on.

The plan got a positive reception from several students at New York University who were enjoying a sunny spring day this week. Some spoke of benefits beyond a financial boon.

Andrew O’Connor, 25, a second-year law student, said loan cancellation could liberate him and his classmates from the pressure of going into corporate law, rather than public interest law.

Another law student, Catherine Larsen, 26, said she had taken out loans just to pay her living expenses, and she expected to go into government service. “It’s kind of scary,” she said. “What if I follow this low-paid path and end up kind of screwed?”

While a federal public service loan forgiveness program exists, questions continue to swirl about eligibility and whether the government will hold up its end of the bargain. Under the Warren plan, federal debt would be cleared “automatically” using available data about income and outstanding debt, meaning borrowers would not have to apply. Eligible private debt would be bought out and canceled by the government.

Supporters of Warren’s plan said it would help people in jobs that require high levels of education but do not command top salaries, like teachers. Warren also presented the plan as a middle-class stimulus package that would put money back into the economy.

Paul Hankins, an English teacher in Sellersburg, Indiana, said that in the next couple of years, his two children would be going to college, and everyone in his family would end up with student debt.

Hankins, 49, returned to school at 30 to become a teacher. He and his wife, a nurse practitioner, had taken on loans willingly to do what they loved, he said, and still owe almost $40,000 combined.

But “it’s a bill that we pay every month,” he said. “And the way you pay them, they hang on for so long. You’re like, ‘Wait, when was the last time that I actually sat in a classroom when I was doing this?’ I could put more money into my classroom if I weren’t putting money back into my education.”

Some critics questioned the value of such a huge investment in tuition and loan cancellation, and whether bailing out people with college degrees was the best way to spend nearly half the proceeds of Warren’s proposed wealth tax, which she estimates would bring in $2.75 trillion over 10 years. (Warren also proposes other uses for the increased tax revenue, like universal child care.)

“I think it’s a hard sell,” said Beth Akers, an economist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, though she did give the Warren campaign credit for trying to make the plan progressive by tying it to income.

Others felt a one-time clearance of debt would not address the root causes of the nation’s student debt crisis. Matthew Chingos, director of the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute, suggested that the plan was not forward-looking enough.

“The plan aims to wipe out a lot of debt, but that could end up being a bit of a Band-Aid, and we’d start marching back to where we are,” Chingos said.

Warren campaign officials argued that overall student debt would shrink because many students would opt for free public college. They added that competition would then drive down the price of private school tuition.

Luke Stuntz, an undergraduate student in environmental studies, was skeptical that people would flock to public colleges if they became tuition free. He said he had chosen to take out loans to go to NYU when he could have gone to a good state school in his home state of Massachusetts for much less.

“I kind of know what I’m getting into,” Stuntz, 19, said. “A lot of kids go into debt not knowing what they want to do.”

In a post on Medium announcing the plan Monday, Warren talked about how she, as an aspiring young teacher, had paid just $50 in tuition a semester at the University of Houston. “I could afford it on a part-time waitressing salary,” she said.

Those days, of course, are long gone. Over the past 20 years, average tuition and fees at private four-year colleges rose 58 percent, after accounting for inflation, while tuition at four-year public colleges increased even more, by more than 100 percent, according to research from the College Board.

Resentment over a potential windfall for others has played no small part in the debate over Warren’s plan. That millions of Americans, in one fell swoop, would be relieved of the punishing burdens that many have scrimped and saved for decades to pay off did not sit well with Warren’s critics.

Anemona Hartocollis

Articles written by the author

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