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The College Board is set to add a so-called “adversity score” to its SAT, which will use fifteen factors to access the level of hardship a student has faced throughout life. Those factor include things such as the crime rate, housing values, and poverty rate in their neighborhoods, their family incomes, whether English is spoken as a second language in the home, and whether the student has one or two parents in the household.

The College Board began beta testing the adversity score last year, and soon it will expand it. The move comes just in time. After an FBI investigation uncovered the largest ever college admissions scheme, many students feel completely demoralized about the college admissions process.

So many students work incredibly hard––too hard, in fact––to get into university. They pay ungodly amounts of money to Kaplan and other test prep giants so that they can game the SAT, they high private admissions counselors, and when it’s all said and done they take out an average of $30,000 loans per student. Of course, the poorest students often take out the most, and they hope to reap huge rewards.

The looming student loan crisis has begun to make many question the worth of a college degree, at least insofar as it was weighed against crushing debt. But for many students, the Singer scam has broken their spirits. The admissions process is so obviously biased and broken, they think, that it’s not worth bothering about.

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