Our Future Elites

High schoolers scoring above 750 on the Math SAT are good candidates to be out in the forefront of newer or at least dominant technologies and driving growth in our "Information Age". On the other hand, we are a race-obsessed society, believing that this elite must - surely must - reflect our wonderful diversity - that this elite should "look like America." Surely, as we all know from watching the most popular shows on T.V. (House, Grey's Anatomy), a large proportion of doctors in elite hospitals - indeed, the more brilliant among them - are African-American. But what can we glean about these future leaders from the published SAT's?

The College Board doesn't publish numbers of students by race at each 50-point scoring cohort -- they only do that for male/female overall (and even now they're only showing results at 100-point cohorts beginning in 2009). But we can estimate how many there should be based on the mean and standard deviation for each group. In the post below, I compared estimated to actual for males/females overall, and the results were right in line. So here are estimates for 2009:

Race	Mean	Std. Dev.	Total	Est 750+	Est 800
Asian	587	125	158757	15259	7016
Black	426	97	187136	78	11
Latino	461	106	103937	333	72
Mexican	463	99	79766	149	26
Native Am	501	128	66448	1719	648
Other	514	119	51215	1212	416
Pacific Isl	450	104	22881	45	9
White	536	103	851014	16059	4414

What's immediately notable is that there are nearly as many Asians expected to score at this level as there are whites, despite the great disparity in overall numbers of test takers - and significantly more Asians than whites are expected to score 800. Next you'll note the very low numbers of minorities who can be expected to score at this level. And the math test is pretty straightforward - nothing fancy, just math a high-schooler should know. It's hard to argue that there are any significant numbers of hidden math geniuses who can't score high on the SAT-M. So the prospects of an innovative elite looking like the rest of the country are pretty dim.

NOTE: It's not unlikely that the actual numbers of minorities, particularly blacks, who scored 750+ was significantly higher than these numbers as there is a strong incentive for high-achieving minorities to take the SAT even in non-SAT regions due to the lure of Ivy League affirmative-action admissions.