The ‘Adversity Score’ is zero

Some kinds of adversity are going to be more adverse than others.

That’s my takeaway from the story in The Wall Street Journal yesterday that was headlined: “SAT to Give Students ‘Adversity Score’ to Capture Social and Economic Background.”

Adversity scores! Wow, what a concept. It used to be, if you lived in a bad neighborhood, you might have your kids move in with a relative in the suburbs, or, failing that, even come up with a phony “mattress” address — whatever it took so that they could have the advantage of going to a better school, living in a safer neighborhood.

Now the College Board is going to give lesser-qualified students an edge over the more-qualified because of the “adversity” they’ve supposedly suffered.

When does the reverse METCO program start, to place suburban kids in crappy city high schools to boost their “adversity” scores?

Now that the Varsity Blues racket has been busted, how long until a new improved college-admissions grift comes along? No more pretending to be a member of the crew team, or a football placekicker — the new Rick Singers will be posing the poor little rich kids outside graffiti-scarred shuttered storefronts in the inner city, swigging on a 40-ouncer.

How many extra points will the College Board give you for a tattoo? Or a teenage pregnancy? What counts for more adversity — an abortion or actually going to full term?

This is just another scam to get around that terrible word — meritocracy, you know, taking in students or job applicants based on their qualifications, as opposed to their status in the ever-evolving hierarchy of Political Correctness.

A college counselor at a suburban Chicago high school bluntly told the paper what kinds of students are truly facing “adversity” in the modern admissions process.

“Do I feel minority students have been discriminated against?” he said. ”Yes, I do. But I see the reversal of it happening right now.”

This is not a new phenomenon — why do you think Elizabeth Warren became a fake Indian 30 years ago? Why did Barack Obama claim to have been born in Indonesia on his book sell-sheet when he was an unknown trying to peddle his “memoirs?”

These frauds are what the federal lawsuit against Harvard University was all about last fall. A century ago, Harvard had quotas to hold down the number of Jewish students. Now they have quotas against Asians.

Asians score on average 100 points above whites, who score 133 points above Hispanics and 177 above blacks.

High SAT scores — the ultimate adversity, at least if you’re a member of a non-protected ethnic class that the Ivy League has deemed worthy of adverse impact.

Remember Harvard’s defense against their academic apartheid? They produced an Asian student with a mediocre high school record — look, they said, we let this guy in! I read the filing and was puzzled why he had been accepted, until I got to the part where the kid said that he had struggled with his “uncertainty” about his sexual identity.

How many notches did that uncertainty push him up on the PC totem pole?

I’m going to guess that certain types of “adversity” aren’t going to count for as much on what they’re calling, in a true 1984-style euphemism, the “Environmental Context Dashboard.”

Here are some types of diversity the College Board won’t care a whit about — coming from an evangelical, or Roman Catholic background; having at least one family member serving in the military; rural background; being raised in a trailer park; having two parents, both of whom work; never having qualified for a free school lunch, or breakfast, or dinner.

In other words: deplorables still need not apply. Same as it ever was.

This is nothing more than another con against working-class kids.

A long time ago, I think it was the Globe that ran a big Sunday story about so-called “white ghettos.” At the time, the Globe claimed the nation’s largest white ghetto was South Boston-Charlestown-Somerville. The second largest was Portland, Maine.

I read that and I thought to myself, I was born in the No. 2 white ghetto, and now I live in No. 1. I was a white-ghetto twofer. To use today’s terminology, I guess I must have endured a lot of “adversity.”

Not that it would have gotten me into Harvard. As we used to joke in White Ghetto No. 1, “Yeah, I went to Harvard. Then I went to Central … Kendall … Charles … I got off at Park Street.”

Bottom line: I’m a white Irish Catholic heterosexual male from Massachusetts. Nobody rides further in the back of the modern PC bus than yours truly. Too bad I’m not applying to college today. I’d change my name to Mr. Adversity.