Removing the SAT would only exacerbate class-based educational inequality. The SAT can be brute-forced via lots of studying that is available for free on the internet these days. If it were removed and changed to “holistic” measures, then knowing the right extracurriculars to have, the right sports to play, the right things to say on a college essay, the right amount of money donated to the college, etc. would become far more important. Holistic admissions are a way for the failed children of the elite to maintain their power.
Knowing what an admissions officer would find moving on a university essay is a class signifier of the highest order. You're anticipating the thought process of university administration! Yet it's become folk knowledge that the SAT is Wrong and Biased and it's importance should be distributed to everything else. It's madness. A discourse where everything is almost beautifully backwards. The devil must be talking to people in their sleep.
Yeah, I read your article when it came out and it's nonsense. First off, your title is a lie. Black and Hispanic students don't outscore Asian and whites. The very highest aspirational categories for blacks outscore the very lowest aspirational categories for whites and Asians. Given that only 5% of blacks meet what the ACT considers college ready, and given that very few whites and Asians are found in the lowest score categories, this suggests that a single digit percentage of the highest scoring blacks barely outtouch the single digit percentage of the lowest scoring whites and Asians.
The average ACT score is 20. Blacks aspiring to post-graduate degrees average a 19.6. Hispanics and Hawaiians in this categore score four points higher.
"In other words, Black, American Native, Hispanic, and Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students with high educational aspirations outscored Asian, White, multiracial, and non-identifying students with lower aspirations. Unfortunately, no one seems to have noticed."
That's because noticing it is demonstration of just how low black scores are and how huge the discount is for blacks going to college. Jesus.
You have it mostly backwards. Eliminating the SAT will allow schools to choose underqualified applicants based on identity politics as well. That is the real goal of higher education these days.
IIRC there is something like a 100 point bump from having taken practice tests compared to just showing up on test day and taking it cold. But beyond that there isn’t much that can be done to move the needle.
This is accurate from what I’ve read and also tracks with real life, from my experience. I went up 100 points from PSAT to SAT simply from learning how to solve the one type of math problem I initially got totally wrong. That being said, I don’t this this is true across the board. I went from 1370 to 1480, thats big, but both scores are high above average. I don’t think you can go from, say 1450-1600 from just studying. Also, a boost from 1250 to 1350 would still broadly put you in the same range of SAT scores.
Asians can. Lots of false positives. I do agree that the under/over for 1200 or so is pretty dispositive--that is, I don't think you can get over 1200 if your original score was well under 1200 to begin with.
Also, the current SAT is far more coachable than the pre-2005 test, or even the pre-2015 test, given a baseline intellect.
What changes have been made? I took it in the 90s, and back then I never heard of anyone studying for it, we all thought it was basically an IQ test that couldn't be studied for.
To say it a bit differently: it is probably true that the NBA scoring records of 6'8" players and 6'10" players aren't much different, but no one infers from that that height doesn't matter in the NBA.
The SAT was radically redesigned in the 1980s. Is there a difference between the predictive power of the two version of the test re: GPA? My understanding is that the old SAT was more G loaded/ correlated more strongly with IQ than the new version
2015--complete rewrite. Math has easier questions on more advanced topics. Grammar has largely replaced vocabulary.
The College Board quit allowing too much granularity in SAT race reporting some time ago but they still do provide percentiles by race (which the ACT doesn't do).
Another thing to remember: the SAT is now used as a graduation test and required by all seniors in some states, while in other states only college bound students take the test. The states requiring the SAT are heavily white, black and Hispanic. The states not requiring the SAT have a lot more Asians.
Therefore the scores of groups are far less reliable. that famous graphic of Asian scores shooting up while other races are declining is in no small part due to the change in populations not being consistent across races. Then Decline to Respond on race is exploding as a category. So blacks and Hispanics taking the SAT exploded, Asians didn't grow much, whites grew even less which makes no sense given the decline in scores unless they're the ones declining to give their race.
And the 2015 test is absurdly coachable, with Asians being by far the most likely to take test prep (and whites the least likely).
I can somewhat understand moving emphasis on vocabulary on the basis of it being too culture-specific or biased towards words used in only certain spheres. But analogies?? That seems like the most basic logic-driven aspect of the test (and honestly the only part I really remember). Why did they remove those??
I never understood the "too culture specific" argument against standardized tests. I know the test is quite a bit different now, but in general the more you read books the better you'll do on the language SAT. If a student isn't fluent in English yet, or has recently immigrated and those reasons are why they don't do well on the SAT, then that kid is going to struggle in college. It seems dishonest to take a student's money when a school knows full well they are unprepared to do the work at that particular institution.
Actually, a great deal of research has shown that "culture specific" questions have less of a gap. The biggest gap questions on most g-loaded tests have nothing to do with culture.
I know it's fashionable to deride University decisions to admit donor-class kids, but let's be honest. Donor-class kids are what enable the vast majority of students to pay far less than the rack rate tuition. Yes, elite colleges could spend down their endowments to achieve the same thing, but...they're not going to. I understand why people dislike legacy preferences, but objecting to admissions for large donors is shooting yourself in the foot.
The point being that it's not as if "rich kids subsidizing poor kids through legacy admissions" is the only way to fund a university that admits poorer kids.
Very low costs & tuition (free public) for all at most gov't owned & operated Universities, with low salaries for teachers and administrators. In Slovakia, no standardized tests, so each college has its own set of tests which are considered along with more standardized, and difficult, tests of subjects needed to graduate HS.
Armchair response here, but I'm guessing they do it via stronger federal funding?
Although the tradeoff might be less overall quality, especially at the high-end, and perhaps less opportunity to take classes outside your declared major.
Admin costs (and sheer number of) are especially through the roof in the U.S.
But your mention of nice facilities is true, and rarely mentioned. American campuses are becoming quite ridiculous in their amenities, I just can't decide if it's due more to market competition, or kids forcing their parents to demand such comfort entitlements outright.
It comes from the schools' desire to compete on anything but price. With unlimited federal credit available, it's the right choice from the schools' perspective. It's easy to criticize school administrations for this sort of thing, but again, let's be honest: most of us are just pigeons pecking the button that makes the food come out. If I were a university president, I would surround myself with a praetorian guard of administrators and define my role as one of lunching with wealthy donors rather than attending grubby student needs.
True...doesn't mean we should be okay with that reality though. Not only did it not used to be nearly this bad, but, like Finster said, other countries don't seem to have that much difficulty doing it a better way.
Public funding of universities is far more generous, and countries outside the US are less squeamish about sorting kids into college prep and vocational tracks during secondary schools.
I've given up trusting the media at all when it comes to reporting any kind of complex issue. But I am also frustrated with how accepting we are of their reporting.
I have a lot of friends and acquaintances that are very smart people, and they try to keep up with current events. But they are constantly falling into the trap of reading just the headline and maybe the first paragraph, or just remembering what they heard on the radio at lunch time, and now they are convinced they know something. But they are absolutely misinformed, and when I point this out to them, most of the time they don't care because it's too hard to understand the real issue.
It's just very frustrating, because this intellectual laziness is so common at all levels of society, and people that are making major decisions about the future of the world are some of the laziest.
Steve Sailer has a running column where he notes how many paragraphs it takes the NYT to include a detail that's key to the story but would upset its subscribers.
(We've gone from legacy media being beholden to the whims of advertisers to being captive to the amour-propre of right-thinking, sweater-vest-wearing scolds who think themselves too smart for cognitive dissonance. In your case I think it's less that understanding the real issue is hard as in requiring vast amounts of intelligence that your smart friends don't have, but that understanding the real issue involves nuance and serious (not necessarily strenuous) and sincere thought.)
The "key" paragraph number keeps increasing from #5 or so in the early 90s to a few from the end now. Worse, the key fact is more and more likely to point in a quite different or even the opposite direction to: the headline, the opening paragraphs, and the bulk of the article.
I wonder how long the holding action will stay at the NYT that even keeps this key point in the article anymore when it is too unpleasant. Unfortunately, I'm starting to see cases where this uncomfortable point does appear to be missing and its existence can only be inferred when comparing the NYT article to other news sources on the same topic and day or the raw polling data , etc., the article references.
I think the first time I really noticed this was when the poverty numbers came out in G. W. Bush's first term. Throughout the 80s and 90s, they were always reported as the percentage of people living below the poverty line.
When they reported the numbers during Bush's first term, they reported them in absolute number (X million) and how that was in increase in absolute number from the previous report. Most articles never reported the percentage, and those that did saved it for the last or second to last paragraph. It turned out that the rate either remained flat or fell slightly (I don't recall which).
I was no fan of Bush, but I do believe that if you're going to judge someone, you should be fair about it.
"I was no fan of Bush, but I do believe that if you're going to judge someone, you should be fair about it."
Yeah. But, that's not how it's done. The NYT is preaching to its choir. That's how they make money and stay in business. If they just stuck to reporting news (in which case the key paragraph would be the first paragraph), they'll go out of business.
It's such a trite observation at this point that I feel guilty even making it but this kind of reading-between-the-lines is so Soviet. What essentially amounts to state media in the US - those outlets that are close to sources in government and the intelligence community - can't be read for textual meaning but can only be read for subtext.
This extends beyond the media itself into the very workings of the legislature. There's no way to watch that Grusch guy babble about UFOs and the flight capabilities of decades prior and just parse it on its merits: the only way to watch and derive actual meaning from that whole sorry hearing is to analyze what benefit any given agency or arm of government will derive from any impression carefully given.
It took the arrival of Trump for the media to gravely intone that "we live in a post-truth world." They were living in it the whole time. All Trump did was tap the fishbowl.
The number of academics I have heard confidently state that the SAT is racist, discriminatory, measures nothing but socioeconomic status or test-taking ability, etc is astounding. This ship has sailed and I think it will be at least a generation before standardized tests are used properly again (outside of heavily STEM-focused places). In the meantime, we'll have a ridiculous, opaque, kludged-together admissions system that no one is really happy with, but at least we're not using the "racist" tests!
It's ridiculous, but I also understand it. Lurking at the base of this topic is the very yucky conversation about differences in racial IQ measurements. Most people, maybe mistakenly, or maybe correctly, will not accept that. So the line needs to be drawn. Some do it at the SAT level. Others allow it to go a little further and use similarly bad statistics to justify their position at a different level.
Fantastic explanation. In your Berkson's Paradox piece you linked, you explain that this is also known as "conditioning on a collider" which is what I know it as from Judea Pearl's excellent Book of Why on causal reasoning.
Education is full of real-world situations in which we've accidentally conditioned on a variable of interest, leading to all kinds of spurious or reversed correlations.
I agree that this is important stuff that no one is talking about. Kudos for doing so with such lucidity.
I enjoyed learning the term "restrictive data set". It's one of those "duhh" moments. Of course if you do an analysis of Harvard students gpa corelated to success it wouldn't look like it matters. Unless mommy bought a building, your SAT score was high. You started studying for it in 6th grade and you likely had the genetics for academics as well.
A standardized test is the best way to compare apples to apples. Yes, the upper echelons have advantages...so what. But the standardized test is a good way to demonstrate ability. Should it be the be all, end all...No. But it should be there and weighted heavily.
I just re-read a couple of John McWhorter's essays about college and Affirmative Action. Affirmative Action was always meant to give a leg up to disadvantaged young people of under represented racial groups. I say under represented because you can't say minority groups because Asians faced serious discrimination (Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese Internment camps). At least that was my understanding. The assumption that all Black and Latinos are somehow disadvantaged is highly prejudicial. The implication is they are inherently somehow less than Whites or Asians. Wrong.
All of this fussing over a few elite colleges is a distraction from improving the lives of 99.9% of everyone else, especially the two thirds of the country who don't go to college. I love learning and education, but college isn't the be all, end all. Who hasn't met a highly educated idiot, or a highly educated asshole?
I clicked and read your article. Pretty good for leading the horse to water. You dance around it, Identitarian ideology = males are the worst, white males being the worst of the worst. Bottom of the rung. Universities are steeped in identitarian ideology. Why would you want to go into a lifetime of debt just to be demonized and shit upon because of immutable characteristics you have no control over? Or, maybe I am wrong, and this has little or nothing to do with the lack of interest in college. I don't know, but it can't be helping.
Yeah, it's definitely not helping. I agree that a lot of teenage boys feel demonized. But do they feel so demonized that it’s shifting the gender ratio for applications? It looks like the gender ratio for applications has been relatively stable for ~30 years. It looks like the decrease in male enrollment over the past decade has more to do with shifting from accepting SAT/ACT where boys have a slight advantage to GPA where boys have a disadvantage. Boys do better on gender-blind testing. But when the gender of the student is known, boys get lower grades. Shifting from gender-blind to non-blind looks like it drove most of the change over the past ten years or so.
Maybe - but then why aren't the boys who get rejected going to another school instead of simply not enrolling in any schools? JR colleges accept everyone. No qualifications needed. Since you used California for your data, I'm sure you are very familiar with the Cal State system. There is a Cal State campus somewhere that will accept pretty much anyone with a pulse, and certainly anyone - even males - who is actually capable of graduating.
Lawrence Summers took a lot of flak a few years ago for pointing out that the distribution for ability is different in men and women. The bell part of the bell curve for ladies is very fat, meaning lots of women clustered around the middle while the outliers on either end are relatively sparsely populated.
For men on the other hand the tails are a lot thicker, meaning that there will be more male geniuses and also more male imbeciles compared to women.
As social restrictions fall away and more average students attend college I'm not surprised that the numbers being to favor women.
Weird - I received an email with your reply to my below comment, but it's not here in the comments? This is what I received - did you cancel it?
That’s a good point about the community colleges. Lots of teenage boys definitely are not enthusiastic about going somewhere they’re going to be demonized. But my concern with attributing too much of the enrollment decline to their demoralization is that it ends up victim blaming young men for not attending college, and ignores the obstacles they face, like fewer scholarships available, fewer resources available on campus, and how the shift to GPA definitely lowered admission rates for men relative to women. I think these things all play a contributing role
I don't think you had or say that you did. Sorry if that was insinuated? It was a fairly milk toast comment and nothing like the type of comment you would want to delete. Plus, if a comment gets deleted - there is usually the word "deleted" to let us all know. IDK what happened, that's why I reposted his comment within mine.
I don't think boys are demonized at all, certainly not at the high school level. I completely agree that it's about grades. But the most likely culprit is homework, which boys just don't do.
I think a lot of the gap is due to black and Hispanic girls doing worse academically but getting better grades. Generally, there are more career-oriented non-college jobs for boys than girls, so it's not surprising that girls go to college for cosmetician, nursing, and kindergarten teaching while boys don't go to college for the military and the trades. That would explain a lot of the gap since the 80s, when pink collar jobs became college bound.
Thank you for this thoughtful, and thought-provoking essay. Your analysis is correct, indeed. The plain truth is that standardized tests are well correlated with past academic performance and good predictors of future academic performance. I've written several articles on that topic as it applies to the ACT, for instance, in Quillette https://quillette.com/2022/07/16/the-act-discriminates/ and The James G Martin Center for Academic Renewal https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/09/the-act-is-still-useful/ , among others. Nonetheless, when the results of the standardized tests don't meet preferred political ideologies, the results are simply ignored. For instance, note this article:
"When ‘Black’ & ‘Hispanic’ Students Outscore ‘Asian’ & ‘White’ Students on the ACT, Nobody Notices"
The biggest threat of the SAT is that it takes away the arbitrary power from the admissions committee. Noting how pro-elite it would be to make admissions dependent on essays and recommendations is a pointless endeavor because this is primarily an intra-elite squabble anyway (with us commoners squawking at the margins).
The elite ideal of the elite college has gone from: (1) social club for rich white men to (2) academic powerhouses that fosters social clubbiness to (3) social club for elite liberal coalition
But - if SATs are accurate, and Whites a bit better with Asians a lot better -- then "white superiority" in SAT test scores is also true. And in college performance, and post-college jobs, on average.
Very important: "There are a lot of people who did shitty in college and who went on to all kinds of creative, intellectual, and political success. " Even more true for life success and without college at all. Still a majority of 30 year old Americans without a college degree (~37 - 48%?)
We need a society where non-college grads are valued more highly than is currently done, today. Especially by college grad elites.
Most people don't score in the top range, by definition, and those people just aren't going to like these tests. They will be motivated to find reasons to get rid of them. It seems enough of them have gained the power to do away with them in some places.
Is there cope analysis for people denying the validity of the SAT? I truly wonder if the anti-SAT animus is partially driven by people who didn't do that well on it, and cope by denying its validity at all.
But it's a total lmao on making GPA and admissions essays even more prominent. GPA inflation has been driven by the same school of though that gives a minimum 50% to students even if they do 0% of the work. If they get 50% for free, what's wrong with a teacher giving a B student a 5% boost into an A, if it has rather important effects on that kid's future? This is actually one of the reasons I didn't become a teacher. I couldn't bear not bending the grading rules for deserving kids.
Admissions essays are an overly performative joke. There's an arms race to make yourself seem extremely oppressed and put upon so that the essay can resolve on you overcoming extreme difficulty. If I was prepping HS seniors on the subject, I would openly and explicitly tell them to heavily embellish their lives to make a good story, if not outright lie.
Don't worry, the SAT will be gradually adjusted until it produces the **right** results. Then we'll be back to relying on divination and inspiring stories produced by AI.
Removing the SAT would only exacerbate class-based educational inequality. The SAT can be brute-forced via lots of studying that is available for free on the internet these days. If it were removed and changed to “holistic” measures, then knowing the right extracurriculars to have, the right sports to play, the right things to say on a college essay, the right amount of money donated to the college, etc. would become far more important. Holistic admissions are a way for the failed children of the elite to maintain their power.
Knowing what an admissions officer would find moving on a university essay is a class signifier of the highest order. You're anticipating the thought process of university administration! Yet it's become folk knowledge that the SAT is Wrong and Biased and it's importance should be distributed to everything else. It's madness. A discourse where everything is almost beautifully backwards. The devil must be talking to people in their sleep.
Excellent point.
These things already matter. Taking away tests means that they will only matter more.
OOps, should have said SAT corelated to gpa. Excuse me. Yes. Proof read before Post.
Anyone know if the SAT racial gap or the GPA racial gap is larger?
I do not have SAT data but you may be interested in this:
"When ‘Black’ & ‘Hispanic’ Students Outscore ‘Asian’ & ‘White’ Students on the ACT, Nobody Notices"
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/when-black-and-hispanic-students
What happens when you compare college bound Asians/whites to college bound blacks/Hispanics?
All of the data are summarized in the articles that I linked. You can also find it in the actual ACT data that is linked in the article here: https://quillette.com/2022/07/16/the-act-discriminates/ Over the last decade the ranking of the overall "Racial/Ethnic" categories have not changed, but the categories have little external validity, as I have pointed out here.... https://fairforall.substack.com/p/understanding-the-act-race-divides
My point would be that doing an apples to apples comparison still shows a racial component with regard to achievement on standardized testing.
I see your point. I just don’t know how informative the categories are because they contain such a wide variety of people.
Yeah, I read your article when it came out and it's nonsense. First off, your title is a lie. Black and Hispanic students don't outscore Asian and whites. The very highest aspirational categories for blacks outscore the very lowest aspirational categories for whites and Asians. Given that only 5% of blacks meet what the ACT considers college ready, and given that very few whites and Asians are found in the lowest score categories, this suggests that a single digit percentage of the highest scoring blacks barely outtouch the single digit percentage of the lowest scoring whites and Asians.
The average ACT score is 20. Blacks aspiring to post-graduate degrees average a 19.6. Hispanics and Hawaiians in this categore score four points higher.
"In other words, Black, American Native, Hispanic, and Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students with high educational aspirations outscored Asian, White, multiracial, and non-identifying students with lower aspirations. Unfortunately, no one seems to have noticed."
That's because noticing it is demonstration of just how low black scores are and how huge the discount is for blacks going to college. Jesus.
You have it mostly backwards. Eliminating the SAT will allow schools to choose underqualified applicants based on identity politics as well. That is the real goal of higher education these days.
I agree with you but am curious why you say the SAT can be brute-forced. By how much?
It seems like the point of this discussion is that IQ-type tests measure something that can't be worked around like that.
(I've taken the GMAT and LSAT. I studied for both and it barely moved my scores. Conversely, studying for the CPA and bar exams was the whole point.)
IIRC there is something like a 100 point bump from having taken practice tests compared to just showing up on test day and taking it cold. But beyond that there isn’t much that can be done to move the needle.
This is accurate from what I’ve read and also tracks with real life, from my experience. I went up 100 points from PSAT to SAT simply from learning how to solve the one type of math problem I initially got totally wrong. That being said, I don’t this this is true across the board. I went from 1370 to 1480, thats big, but both scores are high above average. I don’t think you can go from, say 1450-1600 from just studying. Also, a boost from 1250 to 1350 would still broadly put you in the same range of SAT scores.
Asians can. Lots of false positives. I do agree that the under/over for 1200 or so is pretty dispositive--that is, I don't think you can get over 1200 if your original score was well under 1200 to begin with.
Also, the current SAT is far more coachable than the pre-2005 test, or even the pre-2015 test, given a baseline intellect.
Ooh, that's interesting! I hadn't considered the subsequent changes in the test.
What changes have been made? I took it in the 90s, and back then I never heard of anyone studying for it, we all thought it was basically an IQ test that couldn't be studied for.
Wasn't there also a change in 1995/1996 or so ?
Yes, at some other point in this thread I mention the three major changes.
Oh, I found it.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/let-me-repeat-myself-the-sats-predictive/comment/21485783
To say it a bit differently: it is probably true that the NBA scoring records of 6'8" players and 6'10" players aren't much different, but no one infers from that that height doesn't matter in the NBA.
That is simply a great analogy
Co-sign the other comment—perfect analogy that helped us cut through the stats language to understand this on a very intuitive level
The SAT was radically redesigned in the 1980s. Is there a difference between the predictive power of the two version of the test re: GPA? My understanding is that the old SAT was more G loaded/ correlated more strongly with IQ than the new version
Don't know off the top of my head, but one virtue of ETS is that they have tons of data transparency. Lots of stuff out there.
1995--ended antonyms.
2005--ended analogies
2015--complete rewrite. Math has easier questions on more advanced topics. Grammar has largely replaced vocabulary.
The College Board quit allowing too much granularity in SAT race reporting some time ago but they still do provide percentiles by race (which the ACT doesn't do).
Another thing to remember: the SAT is now used as a graduation test and required by all seniors in some states, while in other states only college bound students take the test. The states requiring the SAT are heavily white, black and Hispanic. The states not requiring the SAT have a lot more Asians.
Therefore the scores of groups are far less reliable. that famous graphic of Asian scores shooting up while other races are declining is in no small part due to the change in populations not being consistent across races. Then Decline to Respond on race is exploding as a category. So blacks and Hispanics taking the SAT exploded, Asians didn't grow much, whites grew even less which makes no sense given the decline in scores unless they're the ones declining to give their race.
And the 2015 test is absurdly coachable, with Asians being by far the most likely to take test prep (and whites the least likely).
I can somewhat understand moving emphasis on vocabulary on the basis of it being too culture-specific or biased towards words used in only certain spheres. But analogies?? That seems like the most basic logic-driven aspect of the test (and honestly the only part I really remember). Why did they remove those??
I never understood the "too culture specific" argument against standardized tests. I know the test is quite a bit different now, but in general the more you read books the better you'll do on the language SAT. If a student isn't fluent in English yet, or has recently immigrated and those reasons are why they don't do well on the SAT, then that kid is going to struggle in college. It seems dishonest to take a student's money when a school knows full well they are unprepared to do the work at that particular institution.
Actually, a great deal of research has shown that "culture specific" questions have less of a gap. The biggest gap questions on most g-loaded tests have nothing to do with culture.
Analogies were the single biggest reason that the SAT got easier. They are very indicative of high verbal ability.
Controlling for test scores, college admissions give a slight bump to the poor and a massive boost to the super-rich.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/07/the-admissions-game.html
I know it's fashionable to deride University decisions to admit donor-class kids, but let's be honest. Donor-class kids are what enable the vast majority of students to pay far less than the rack rate tuition. Yes, elite colleges could spend down their endowments to achieve the same thing, but...they're not going to. I understand why people dislike legacy preferences, but objecting to admissions for large donors is shooting yourself in the foot.
How do universities outside the US do it?
The point being that it's not as if "rich kids subsidizing poor kids through legacy admissions" is the only way to fund a university that admits poorer kids.
Very low costs & tuition (free public) for all at most gov't owned & operated Universities, with low salaries for teachers and administrators. In Slovakia, no standardized tests, so each college has its own set of tests which are considered along with more standardized, and difficult, tests of subjects needed to graduate HS.
Armchair response here, but I'm guessing they do it via stronger federal funding?
Although the tradeoff might be less overall quality, especially at the high-end, and perhaps less opportunity to take classes outside your declared major.
Lower labor costs, more state support. Also, they tend to have less nice facilities.
Admin costs (and sheer number of) are especially through the roof in the U.S.
But your mention of nice facilities is true, and rarely mentioned. American campuses are becoming quite ridiculous in their amenities, I just can't decide if it's due more to market competition, or kids forcing their parents to demand such comfort entitlements outright.
It comes from the schools' desire to compete on anything but price. With unlimited federal credit available, it's the right choice from the schools' perspective. It's easy to criticize school administrations for this sort of thing, but again, let's be honest: most of us are just pigeons pecking the button that makes the food come out. If I were a university president, I would surround myself with a praetorian guard of administrators and define my role as one of lunching with wealthy donors rather than attending grubby student needs.
True...doesn't mean we should be okay with that reality though. Not only did it not used to be nearly this bad, but, like Finster said, other countries don't seem to have that much difficulty doing it a better way.
Public funding of universities is far more generous, and countries outside the US are less squeamish about sorting kids into college prep and vocational tracks during secondary schools.
I've given up trusting the media at all when it comes to reporting any kind of complex issue. But I am also frustrated with how accepting we are of their reporting.
I have a lot of friends and acquaintances that are very smart people, and they try to keep up with current events. But they are constantly falling into the trap of reading just the headline and maybe the first paragraph, or just remembering what they heard on the radio at lunch time, and now they are convinced they know something. But they are absolutely misinformed, and when I point this out to them, most of the time they don't care because it's too hard to understand the real issue.
It's just very frustrating, because this intellectual laziness is so common at all levels of society, and people that are making major decisions about the future of the world are some of the laziest.
Steve Sailer has a running column where he notes how many paragraphs it takes the NYT to include a detail that's key to the story but would upset its subscribers.
(We've gone from legacy media being beholden to the whims of advertisers to being captive to the amour-propre of right-thinking, sweater-vest-wearing scolds who think themselves too smart for cognitive dissonance. In your case I think it's less that understanding the real issue is hard as in requiring vast amounts of intelligence that your smart friends don't have, but that understanding the real issue involves nuance and serious (not necessarily strenuous) and sincere thought.)
The average is in the low 20s.
Here's one very poignant example: https://www.unz.com/isteve/see-if-you-can-anticipate-what-the-nyt-reveals-in-the-23rd-paragraph-about-why-boy-killed-himself/
I've noticed this trend for 30+ years now.
The "key" paragraph number keeps increasing from #5 or so in the early 90s to a few from the end now. Worse, the key fact is more and more likely to point in a quite different or even the opposite direction to: the headline, the opening paragraphs, and the bulk of the article.
I wonder how long the holding action will stay at the NYT that even keeps this key point in the article anymore when it is too unpleasant. Unfortunately, I'm starting to see cases where this uncomfortable point does appear to be missing and its existence can only be inferred when comparing the NYT article to other news sources on the same topic and day or the raw polling data , etc., the article references.
I think the first time I really noticed this was when the poverty numbers came out in G. W. Bush's first term. Throughout the 80s and 90s, they were always reported as the percentage of people living below the poverty line.
When they reported the numbers during Bush's first term, they reported them in absolute number (X million) and how that was in increase in absolute number from the previous report. Most articles never reported the percentage, and those that did saved it for the last or second to last paragraph. It turned out that the rate either remained flat or fell slightly (I don't recall which).
I was no fan of Bush, but I do believe that if you're going to judge someone, you should be fair about it.
"I was no fan of Bush, but I do believe that if you're going to judge someone, you should be fair about it."
Yeah. But, that's not how it's done. The NYT is preaching to its choir. That's how they make money and stay in business. If they just stuck to reporting news (in which case the key paragraph would be the first paragraph), they'll go out of business.
It's such a trite observation at this point that I feel guilty even making it but this kind of reading-between-the-lines is so Soviet. What essentially amounts to state media in the US - those outlets that are close to sources in government and the intelligence community - can't be read for textual meaning but can only be read for subtext.
This extends beyond the media itself into the very workings of the legislature. There's no way to watch that Grusch guy babble about UFOs and the flight capabilities of decades prior and just parse it on its merits: the only way to watch and derive actual meaning from that whole sorry hearing is to analyze what benefit any given agency or arm of government will derive from any impression carefully given.
It took the arrival of Trump for the media to gravely intone that "we live in a post-truth world." They were living in it the whole time. All Trump did was tap the fishbowl.
The number of academics I have heard confidently state that the SAT is racist, discriminatory, measures nothing but socioeconomic status or test-taking ability, etc is astounding. This ship has sailed and I think it will be at least a generation before standardized tests are used properly again (outside of heavily STEM-focused places). In the meantime, we'll have a ridiculous, opaque, kludged-together admissions system that no one is really happy with, but at least we're not using the "racist" tests!
It's ridiculous, but I also understand it. Lurking at the base of this topic is the very yucky conversation about differences in racial IQ measurements. Most people, maybe mistakenly, or maybe correctly, will not accept that. So the line needs to be drawn. Some do it at the SAT level. Others allow it to go a little further and use similarly bad statistics to justify their position at a different level.
What do we do about this? I dunno.
You might be interested in this:
"When ‘Black’ & ‘Hispanic’ Students Outscore ‘Asian’ & ‘White’ Students on the ACT, Nobody Notices"
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/when-black-and-hispanic-students
I read it. At the risk of sounding like a jerk, I'm scratching my head as to why anyone at all would have bothered to write it.
Ignoring reality isn't going to make it go away.
Fantastic explanation. In your Berkson's Paradox piece you linked, you explain that this is also known as "conditioning on a collider" which is what I know it as from Judea Pearl's excellent Book of Why on causal reasoning.
Education is full of real-world situations in which we've accidentally conditioned on a variable of interest, leading to all kinds of spurious or reversed correlations.
I agree that this is important stuff that no one is talking about. Kudos for doing so with such lucidity.
I enjoyed learning the term "restrictive data set". It's one of those "duhh" moments. Of course if you do an analysis of Harvard students gpa corelated to success it wouldn't look like it matters. Unless mommy bought a building, your SAT score was high. You started studying for it in 6th grade and you likely had the genetics for academics as well.
A standardized test is the best way to compare apples to apples. Yes, the upper echelons have advantages...so what. But the standardized test is a good way to demonstrate ability. Should it be the be all, end all...No. But it should be there and weighted heavily.
I just re-read a couple of John McWhorter's essays about college and Affirmative Action. Affirmative Action was always meant to give a leg up to disadvantaged young people of under represented racial groups. I say under represented because you can't say minority groups because Asians faced serious discrimination (Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese Internment camps). At least that was my understanding. The assumption that all Black and Latinos are somehow disadvantaged is highly prejudicial. The implication is they are inherently somehow less than Whites or Asians. Wrong.
All of this fussing over a few elite colleges is a distraction from improving the lives of 99.9% of everyone else, especially the two thirds of the country who don't go to college. I love learning and education, but college isn't the be all, end all. Who hasn't met a highly educated idiot, or a highly educated asshole?
Your final paragraph is spot on!
It looks like removing the SAT from UC admissions exacerbated the college enrollment gender gap as well: https://taboo.substack.com/p/forecasting-college-enrollment
I clicked and read your article. Pretty good for leading the horse to water. You dance around it, Identitarian ideology = males are the worst, white males being the worst of the worst. Bottom of the rung. Universities are steeped in identitarian ideology. Why would you want to go into a lifetime of debt just to be demonized and shit upon because of immutable characteristics you have no control over? Or, maybe I am wrong, and this has little or nothing to do with the lack of interest in college. I don't know, but it can't be helping.
Yeah, it's definitely not helping. I agree that a lot of teenage boys feel demonized. But do they feel so demonized that it’s shifting the gender ratio for applications? It looks like the gender ratio for applications has been relatively stable for ~30 years. It looks like the decrease in male enrollment over the past decade has more to do with shifting from accepting SAT/ACT where boys have a slight advantage to GPA where boys have a disadvantage. Boys do better on gender-blind testing. But when the gender of the student is known, boys get lower grades. Shifting from gender-blind to non-blind looks like it drove most of the change over the past ten years or so.
Maybe - but then why aren't the boys who get rejected going to another school instead of simply not enrolling in any schools? JR colleges accept everyone. No qualifications needed. Since you used California for your data, I'm sure you are very familiar with the Cal State system. There is a Cal State campus somewhere that will accept pretty much anyone with a pulse, and certainly anyone - even males - who is actually capable of graduating.
Lawrence Summers took a lot of flak a few years ago for pointing out that the distribution for ability is different in men and women. The bell part of the bell curve for ladies is very fat, meaning lots of women clustered around the middle while the outliers on either end are relatively sparsely populated.
For men on the other hand the tails are a lot thicker, meaning that there will be more male geniuses and also more male imbeciles compared to women.
As social restrictions fall away and more average students attend college I'm not surprised that the numbers being to favor women.
Weird - I received an email with your reply to my below comment, but it's not here in the comments? This is what I received - did you cancel it?
That’s a good point about the community colleges. Lots of teenage boys definitely are not enthusiastic about going somewhere they’re going to be demonized. But my concern with attributing too much of the enrollment decline to their demoralization is that it ends up victim blaming young men for not attending college, and ignores the obstacles they face, like fewer scholarships available, fewer resources available on campus, and how the shift to GPA definitely lowered admission rates for men relative to women. I think these things all play a contributing role
Didn't delete any comments
I don't think you had or say that you did. Sorry if that was insinuated? It was a fairly milk toast comment and nothing like the type of comment you would want to delete. Plus, if a comment gets deleted - there is usually the word "deleted" to let us all know. IDK what happened, that's why I reposted his comment within mine.
I believe you mean “milquetoast”—or you were just making a joke. Anyway, just in case.
I clicked "edit" and it disappeared. I'm glad you got it though, thank you for posting.
"I clicked "edit" and it disappeared."
The ultimate edit!
That's what I get for using a customized config of Firefox. Lots of privacy. But not always functionality.
I don't think boys are demonized at all, certainly not at the high school level. I completely agree that it's about grades. But the most likely culprit is homework, which boys just don't do.
I think a lot of the gap is due to black and Hispanic girls doing worse academically but getting better grades. Generally, there are more career-oriented non-college jobs for boys than girls, so it's not surprising that girls go to college for cosmetician, nursing, and kindergarten teaching while boys don't go to college for the military and the trades. That would explain a lot of the gap since the 80s, when pink collar jobs became college bound.
By the way, Reeves book is simply garbage.
Thank you for this thoughtful, and thought-provoking essay. Your analysis is correct, indeed. The plain truth is that standardized tests are well correlated with past academic performance and good predictors of future academic performance. I've written several articles on that topic as it applies to the ACT, for instance, in Quillette https://quillette.com/2022/07/16/the-act-discriminates/ and The James G Martin Center for Academic Renewal https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2022/09/the-act-is-still-useful/ , among others. Nonetheless, when the results of the standardized tests don't meet preferred political ideologies, the results are simply ignored. For instance, note this article:
"When ‘Black’ & ‘Hispanic’ Students Outscore ‘Asian’ & ‘White’ Students on the ACT, Nobody Notices"
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/when-black-and-hispanic-students Thank you again for a great essay.
The biggest threat of the SAT is that it takes away the arbitrary power from the admissions committee. Noting how pro-elite it would be to make admissions dependent on essays and recommendations is a pointless endeavor because this is primarily an intra-elite squabble anyway (with us commoners squawking at the margins).
The elite ideal of the elite college has gone from: (1) social club for rich white men to (2) academic powerhouses that fosters social clubbiness to (3) social club for elite liberal coalition
Excellent graphs, and importantly true. As usual.
But - if SATs are accurate, and Whites a bit better with Asians a lot better -- then "white superiority" in SAT test scores is also true. And in college performance, and post-college jobs, on average.
Very important: "There are a lot of people who did shitty in college and who went on to all kinds of creative, intellectual, and political success. " Even more true for life success and without college at all. Still a majority of 30 year old Americans without a college degree (~37 - 48%?)
We need a society where non-college grads are valued more highly than is currently done, today. Especially by college grad elites.
Most people don't score in the top range, by definition, and those people just aren't going to like these tests. They will be motivated to find reasons to get rid of them. It seems enough of them have gained the power to do away with them in some places.
Is there cope analysis for people denying the validity of the SAT? I truly wonder if the anti-SAT animus is partially driven by people who didn't do that well on it, and cope by denying its validity at all.
But it's a total lmao on making GPA and admissions essays even more prominent. GPA inflation has been driven by the same school of though that gives a minimum 50% to students even if they do 0% of the work. If they get 50% for free, what's wrong with a teacher giving a B student a 5% boost into an A, if it has rather important effects on that kid's future? This is actually one of the reasons I didn't become a teacher. I couldn't bear not bending the grading rules for deserving kids.
Admissions essays are an overly performative joke. There's an arms race to make yourself seem extremely oppressed and put upon so that the essay can resolve on you overcoming extreme difficulty. If I was prepping HS seniors on the subject, I would openly and explicitly tell them to heavily embellish their lives to make a good story, if not outright lie.
Thank you for returning to this point, even if it's for the umpteenth time.
Don't worry, the SAT will be gradually adjusted until it produces the **right** results. Then we'll be back to relying on divination and inspiring stories produced by AI.
Or perhaps one of those Harry Potter magic hats that sorted out the kids into their respective tribes.