> but there’s every reason to believe that a scandalous amount of the affirmative action slots at elite colleges are going to wealthy international students from Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria
I have no idea if Freddie's right or not but what you cite here isn't the same as what he's describing. These demographics are describing students who are *already admitted*. It says nothing about how those admissions were governed in the first place.
Right but if Harvard or wherever wants to publicly claim x% of its class is Black, admitting rich African students won't help it get there, so why would they bother giving admissions preference to those kids?
Because (for example) 'we admitted x% Black affirmative action students from a total pool of z applicants' is a separate measure from 'y% of the student body is, according to this one metric, Black'.
Again, not saying you are right or wrong, but one takeaway from Freddie's piece is that admissions are Serious Business, and top schools with multi-billion dollar endowments have a phalanx of staff whose job it is to massage these figures while keeping the money coming in. To me, it's *less* believable that there's one Black undergraduate number to rule them all than it is there are multiple figures to match whatever the question is.
Excellent post, top to bottom. The endless focus on either legacy or "anti-White/anti-Asian" admissions at a vanishingly small number of schools with highly competitive admissions processes, at the expense of the overwhelming percentage of college-bound students and the finances that go into them... it's like watching the Great Fire of Chicago and worrying about a cigarette lighter. But like you say, the media only cares about the top schools, and commentators only care about facile examples they can use to back up their politics.*
Higher education is full of misaligned incentives the whole way through and as long as they are aligned with financial goals that will continue to be the case. The top schools will go for the student who matches a donor profile. All other schools will stack students to the rafters for the immediate tuition check.
*And here's mine: public universities in this country should be much more selective and much cheaper, and states should reallocate a lot of funding for these schools to either vocational schools or something else entirely. Education as a training ground for an enlightened citizenry is passé; if college is to be economic and vocational then let the resource allocation match the goal.
College has become the rubber stamp needed for a white collar job. None of the jobs I've done have involved anything I've done in college, and most people in white collar degree-mandatory jobs have the same story. Even in the highly technical courses, like engineering, people often tell me it has little do with their schooling.
If these white collar jobs are necessary (question for another day), I think there needs to be a route towards them that doesn't require four years and a billion dollars of student loan debt.
You're right. I'm talking past the sale a bit. "Must have a Bachelor's" is very prevalent and very depressing. I guess in my world, if my suggestion took place, many employers would find themselves unable to find people with a Bachelor's and would adjust accordingly.
Agreed. I really had no interest in college and just went because that's what suburban upper-middle class kids do. I think people like me should not be in colleges.
Peter Thiel's politics and moral views are truly cretinous, but I think he and his think-tanks are right in predicting that the apprenticeship model is due for a dramatic comeback in most professional fields. Conditional employment with mentorship and a gradual escalation of responsibilities is just a more sensible way to go about hiring candidates than skimming their college transcript and a round of interviews that mostly tests how good they are at bullshitting you.
Are there ways this arrangement could be catastrophically bad for workers? Of course! Is rampant, escalating credentialism any better, though?
I have another comment on this post about interviews. I agree, it's not a good criteria. I think it mostly tests whether the hiring manager likes you.
As for the apprenticeship piece, I'm not so sure. I think companies are happy to offload the cost of the more general training onto the university system. I also think (unlike Thiel, I imagine) that corporate offices are incredibly slow to adapt and close-minded, so I can see even obvious changes never occurring.
I think a legitimate apprenticeship program might save some money in that it saves the cost of the new hires that don't work out. One job I had, civil service-type exam to get in but the workplace knew that a lot of candidates who passed the exam wouldn't be good at the job. So the "training" program was part apprenticeship and part covert emotional abuse, to get rid of the people they didn't like/who weren't fast enough, without triggering the union protections.
Something where they could hire people on criteria in addition the exam, and make a commitment to those people, invest in their success, that would have saved them thousands of dollars in paying for people who were "attritioned"(that should be a word).
Offices could have gone remote 5 years ago but didn't. Most of these "full time remote jobs" would still be in an office if it weren't for COVID. I just don't see businesses making major changes.
My husband is a senior IT analyst running a public safety network. His undergraduate degree was in Ancient Greek and Hebrew. The cyber security training he received in an elite Navy program as a young adult (married with a child) is what prepared him for this job. He says lots of IT people find their undergrad degrees less than great preparation for actual jobs in part because tech changes so fast.
Sure, but show me two job applicants, both with the Navy cyber training but just one of whom ALSO has a degree in Ancient Greek and Hebrew, and which one am I going to want to hire?
Signaling, signaling, signaling, that's what college is for.
Show me two job applicants with the Navy cyber training but one of them had the motivation, self-discipline, and intelligence required to learn two difficult dead languages, which are you going to choose?
Look, I'm with Freddie on most of what he says in this post, but you're "signaling" narrative in these comments really goes too far. You're basically claiming that learning complex subject matter has no value unless directly related to the buttons one pushes at work, and that's bizarrely cynical and false.
I'm struggling to figure out what you don't agree with me about. Maybe it's the intrinsic value of spending four years learning a couple of dead languages, as opposed to the signaling value of showing that you are capable of such a feat?
I'm all for learning for learning's sake, if someone wants to devote the time effort and money to it. (And college is WAY too expensive these days.)
We are agreed on the too expensive part. I guess we're not agreed on the intrinsic value of the liberal arts stuff.
I'm often a co-author on papers that have many co-authors, and I'm often one of the only ones that can write well enough to edit the manuscript (and "edit" means "re-write all the incoherent parts"). Did I need to learn Greek to do that? Not necessarily, but I would have needed to do something else frivolously liberal artsy to learn to write.
Similarly, part of my role at the university is to teach computational skills to incoming biomedical graduate students. Many people in my field are not good teachers. Did I need to learn Greek to teach well? Not necessarily, but it helped--I know a lot of miscellaneous stuff about education and rhetoric that comes in handy, and I was a junior high Latin teacher for a few years. My colleagues who took a more direct approach on this career path, e.g. studying computer science as undergraduates, tend to be bad at writing, teaching, and public speaking.
Sometimes I look back and think I wasted some years and would be further along in my career had I taken a more direct path, but generally I feel like liberal arts departments do a pretty good job teaching students how to write, speak, and teach, that I got something valuable that my STEM-only colleagues lack. I hope we can fix the education system without wrecking the parts that do work fairly well.
More than once he’s expressed a degree of regret for his undergrad choices, both because of debt and because of the seeming irrelevance to job skills. I’ve been the one always talking up the positives—including having met me there :) That being said, he’s finally about to receive debt forgiveness for the $9,000 he’s got left in loans, 15+ years after graduation, because Biden’s policies allowed him to transfer his loans to the “right” kind (there’s a program for debt forgiveness of federal loans if you work in public service for 10 years and make 100+ monthly payments. Until Biden, it was notoriously difficult to actually meet the very narrow standards; he had the “wrong” kind of federal loan, and before he couldn’t change it and still have all the years and payments count toward the forgiveness.)
I hear that. The money side of all this is just horrific.
I have friends with tenure at small liberal arts colleges who still have over $50k in debt and who feel terrible about seeing most of their students similarly ensnared in debt. It appears that most of these institutions will not survive the next financial downturn--most of the students they are admitting are not college ready and don't even need a college education, so this will not be a huge loss. Hopefully they won't all just be replaced by for-profit schools that harvest federal funding.
I do research at a very large, somewhat rural red state R1 university that's good academically and not very expensive. It would have been too homophobic an environment for me back in the 90s when I was looking at schools, but things have changed, and I feel like it's actually a relatively good deal at $12k/year and widespread, generous financial aid. I'm sure financial aid could and should be made more generous, but I don't generally feel like the place should be burned to the ground and replaced with something drawn up along more utopian lines.
I have a huge amount of affection for my small liberal arts college education. I used my degree in English in the newspaper industry for a few years. (In a big pivot, I’m working toward a BS in nursing now.) So having the experience of both a private liberal arts education AND a public science education, I still don’t regret it. I would never want to see the option go away; I would like to see lots of other training options for people like, say, my brother, who has tons of debt and no degree because college wasn’t a good fit.
The real question is whether the number of open positions makes that question relevant. If there are enough unfilled spots then the guy with only the Navy training and the college grad both get jobs.
I'm in data science with a MA in Classics. You're underestimating the overlap between the subjects. After the first time you learn something arbitrary and complex with no direct relevance to your daily life (e.g. Greek grammar, computer programming), well you find out that you can do it repeatedly. I can't think of any better preparation for learning IT crap than having learned dead languages.
When I first got into tech years ago the NY Times ran an editorial bitching that nobody in the industry spoke French anymore. There is a long tradition in tech of the industry hoovering up anybody who could do the work regardless of what their major was or even if they had a degree.
This has always been the case with IT, although *not* with the more prestigious tech development jobs. That is, working IT at a securities firm vs getting a gig at Google, Apple, or Facebook.
It depends. Never graduating is viewed as a sort of badge of honor in some quarters, probably because there are so many famous figures in tech who did the same (Jobs/Gates/Zuckerberg/etc.).
The route has to be difficult in order to demonstrate commitment and work ethic, otherwise it fails its signaling function, which is the primary function of college.
However, the billion dollars in debt is a relatively recent phenomenon and does seem like an unnecessary aspect of it.
I agree with the signaling point. But 1) Does it need to be four years and so much of your time during those four years? and 2) Is it even a good idea to put resources into providing signals for hiring managers?
The military accomplishes the same thing, but without all the debt. And in fact, with lots of benefits. But how one feels about the military is another conversation.
This is one of those instances when it is CRUCIAL to differentiate Black from African. Data on Black Americans actually UNDERSTATES their level of social and economic marginalization because it groups actual Black Americans (I.E. descendents of pre-Civil Rights Act Americans) and African Americans (individuals who immigrated from Africa post CRA) when African Americans are economically doing pretty damn well in the US.
I find it hard to care about debates concerning "fair" criteria for who gets a limited number of comfy upper-middle class spots. I don't really put a lot of thought into who should get go to Harvard or who should get to be CFO of a fortune 500. Should it be only quantifiable talent? Should we have affirmative action to make up for historical injustices or implicit bias? I dunno. Does it matter to 99% of the population? Probably not
As Matt Yglesias put it: meritocracy is bad. I'd rather improve the bottom than squabble over the criteria of the top.
"... debt burden is skewed towards the marginal students who lack the human capital to then pay back that debt...".
Hate the term "human capital", like fingernails on blackboard hate (are there blackboards any more?).
Labor and capital are opposed. The poor souls that go into college debt end up laboring to pay that back (sometimes forever). They have as virtually no capital of which to speak.
Off the soapbox, great post. I'll go have a cup of coffee.
Since most people won't read it, here's the key quote.
"Let’s say for example I have a process for hiring that was super transparent and also has no correlation with future performance. I show people the process’s internal logic: turns out, I’m just randomly sorting the list of N candidates and picking the first M candidates in that list.
Now let’s say I implement another process for choosing candidates. It’s just me making decisions based on my gut. Turns out, my gut is also no better than average and my gut choices have no correlation with future performance either.
[...] Despite that, if I implement the latter process nobody at my company would bat an eye, and if I implemented the former process I’d get fired on the spot for being not serious."
In short, I think people overrate the value of their discretion.
It's not like being a self-underrating person helps success.
To the extent any "success" research is believable to begin with, it seems to show the best way to make use of what you've got is to overestimate its value just a little.
The pressures on K-12 education seem to often run directly counter to the situations faced by universities.
In one of my multiple brushes with higher ed I tutored college students in an introductory alegbra class. It was a gatekeeping class in that majors required it which probably didn't need to require it and some students had to take it 3 times. What I noticed from those students was that the math disconnect often started in 3rd grade. Memorizing the multiplication tables. Without having the multiplication facts, division got stumbly. Without division, fractions got very slow. Least common multiple and greatest common factor were knee deep in the sand and then quadratic equations, graphing and algebra were impossible.
The usual US education strategy of "pass them with a C" creates this. Because C means they didn't understand 25% of it and for subjects that are very cumulative, building on prior knowledge, that 25% builds up fast.
I think math remediation still lives in special ed-IEP land, though. Which means a different funding stream and lots of evals and testing, which the child must do poorly on in order to qualify. A student with C/D grades in math with no "disabilities" may not be eligible for school-based math help.
Some tutoring programs are trying to change this, which is good.
But before a student gets to college and discovers they can't do enough algebra to get their EMT certificate or something, even an English teaching degree, there has been a lot of buck-passing in the K-12.
I was a math tutor for years. I think there was buck-passing in both K-12 and community colleges. No idea what goes in the latter, never attended one myself, but those people did not come in with requisite math knowledge.
IIRC math was supposed to accomplish several things at once. Learning how to solve problems, learning how to be rigorous in your written work (checking, looking for mistakes) and learning how to think structurally.
So even if the degree wasn't going to "use" the quadratic equation, the years of gymnastics leading up to it were supposed to make the student more fit.
That makes sense to a point, but if so many people are exiting the end of the K-12 pipe without the skills/rigor/fitness, manifesting primarily in the math classes, it becomes a social drain because people who would otherwise be able to get middle-class jobs, teachers, health care, don't do it.
I'm not sure this is a solution but at some point if they separate "math track" versus "non-math track" students, sometime around middle school, with generous leeway for students who still wanted to do math and were willing to work hard at it even if they weren't good at it - it might free up some pressure and suffering. The "apprenticeship" idea might really work here, the "math track" would be a sort of STEM apprenticeship.
I think some colleges just stopped requiring algebra.
The reading is another weird scene.
The schools don't want to fight with the kids, parents, and Scholastic Book Fair, so they buy lots of picture books (all the way up through 6 at least - I love graphic novels, but it is a different skill set).
"I think some colleges just stopped requiring algebra."
Call it "STEM Master Race" if you want, but if someone can't do algebra, I'm skeptical of their thinking skills being any good in the subjects they do pass.
That’s another part of the conversation, yes. Saying “thinking is overrated” is a disastrous way to put it. But there are many necessary human activities that don’t require those skills. Someone with math thinking skills may do better at it, for some fields it seems orthogonal - like cooking, landscaping, fine arts, etc.
In terms of philosophy, law, yes, doing poorly in math would be an indicator. That type of thinking matters for many things.
And there is a sorting going on based on STEM aptitude and performance, for sure. If they need the rest of humanity, and what for, that’ll be interesting to watch develop. Right now I think maybe they don’t need 6 billion of us after all.
I also wonder if this causes some of the half-baked ideas that get discussed on this blog. In my experience, I don't see a whole lot of STEM or philosophy people worrying about "cultural appropriation" or other weird campus activism crap. That seems resigned to the people that probably lack basic math skills
I mostly understand the things like “cultural appropriation.” I don’t always agree with the proposed remedies though. One way to look at it is the progression of monetization of every aspect of culture. People feel cheated when someone from the out group makes a mediocre version of something and then sells it/gets paid, gains status with their in group or both. People may feel cheated even if it’s a good version or something interesting somehow, or if there isn’t much money made. If the out group punishes them when they do the cultural thing, but when their own people do it they shower praise and money, that’s at the very least hypocritical and can be pointed out.
STEM has a long history of being international. STEM culture, such as it is, values appropriation of concepts and ideas, seeks it, even. So “appropriation” as bad will seem backward.
STEM culture is still situated within nation-based societies though. Campuses can feel really toxic for so many reasons; “this feels toxic” is not a priority of every STEM major but it is for some. The activism is probably making it more toxic in different ways rather than less toxic, though.
America eats its young, I first heard that in the 90s and I’d say it’s still true. I thought certain problems were solvable, now I’m not so sure.
"if someone can't do algebra, I'm skeptical of their thinking skills being any good in the subjects they do pass." I know people who were not good at math, but very very good at writing and at college. I do not believe they should have been weeded out for their math badness.
You probably also saw the whole ACEs/PTSD/concentration problems/math struggles thing. I mostly saw it in classmates but for some students, life chaos impacts their focus significantly. We need a kind of memory/concentration rehab for youth.
I can speak to community college. The problem is that for many students, remediation doesn’t work. They fail (sometimes 2-3 times) and then drop out.
There are exceptions of course, and some of the interventions seem to have modest effects. But the passing rates are terrible. Even when they pass, instructors in the next level complain that they aren’t ready.
" Even when they pass, instructors in the next level complain that they aren’t ready."
I might not have been clear, but this is the group I'm talking about. I tutored at a 4-year, and we had students who passed whatever was at their community college but clearly didn't know enough very much
Good lord, this is like an index to my writing over the past ten years. I agree with almost everything said, although I'd quibble here:
"which is apparently undesirable for social reasons and for fear that these Asian students represent stiff academic competition"
It is *definitely* undesirable for social reasons, and there's not much fear that the Asian students represent academic competition. Asian education culture is extremely unattractive to Americans (of all races) and as you say, colleges want rich whites to donate. They're fine with rich Asians donating, far less fine with admitting hundreds of recent Asian immigrants with unwealthy parents who spent 8 years prepping for the SAT while simultaneously in three years of prep for the SHSAT. I wrote about white flight from high school test-based admissions schools. Many others have noticed that all the schools that ended testing have or will become much more white. Far less mentioned is that whites aren't *interested* in the schools. This is most clearly observable in NYC, as they show the testing rates. Whites and Asians have very similar admissions rates and represent the same percentage of the NYC public school population, but Asians test at twice the rate of whites (and it's a safe bet that a good chunk of the whites are immigrants.) So while people bewail the change as cynical, it is to me a fair question why any community should spend a lot of money on a test-based school that is primarily used by immigrants. The next question is why bother having test-based schools at all, of course. Article: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/08/01/white-flight-from-admissions-test-high-schools/
While I'm a fan of tests, I've stopped believing in the granular scores. Kind of like IQ. The difference between a 600 and 800 SAT math score is irrelevant until you tell me how much each one prepped. But the difference between a 400 and a 600--even a 500 and a 600--is much more relevant. In much the same way that the difference between a 115 and 130 IQ isn't something I'd bank on, but 90 and 115 is relevant. Asian test prep did much to kill my faith in high scores as an absolute indicator. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/09/18/false-positives/
One of the undercovered aspects of the college fraud story was the College Board couldn't promise the reliability of its test scores. Proctors were bribed to complete the test. Moreover, the College Board doesn't like spending money creating a separate international test, so it just reuses old American ones--that information gets out very quickly the day of the test, and the international prep companies have provided their kids with all the old copies of the test to memorize. So the day of the test, the info on which test is sent out to millions of testers, who just regurgitate the answers they memorized for that test. (Or they are just sent the answers to copy down if they pay extra for a jijing). Wrote about this here https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/the-sat-is-corrupt-no-one-wants-to-know/ and here https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/the-sat-is-corrupt-reuters-version/
I found this appalling, because the College Board and other academic tests were about the only ones that were left to be somewhat secure. Microsoft and other tech companies pay a fortune to kind of sort of protect the integrity of their certification tests. Whenever someone says we should end college and just use certification or credential tests, I laugh. Reliable tests cost a fortune to produce. To make tests really safe, you'd have to be sure that no questions got out, no format got out, and everyone taking the test was only interested in the certification. And even then, you'd have to isolate the testers for 24 hours after the test so they couldn't brain dump.
While the failure rate of students who take on huge loans is a tragedy, at least those people are doing it by choice. Far worse societally is the fact the college degree is becoming ruined as any sort of academic marker. Freddie mentioned remediation--but colleges are doing away with remediation. the entire state university systems in California and Tennessee had done away with them several years ago, but the push to abolish the SAT will make that even more prevalent. I wrote about it here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2017/04/15/corrupted-college/
This is hands down the largest issue. Its's getting worse, too. We need far fewer colleges.
The fixes are all impossible and would fail disparate impact tests:
1. Use federal oversight to stop all colleges from accepting unqualified candidates. Congress should set a minimum demonstrated ability level federally guaranteed loans--say, an ACT section score of 23, an SAT score of 550 (or even 500). Pell grants, too, should have a minimum. If you don't think this will make a difference, you are unaware of the depths of illiterate that colleges are stooping to.
2. The big fix that might work is at the state level. I would love to see some red states require a minimum ACT/SAT score and get past the lawsuit. If things get as bad as I fear, college degrees are going to become worthless, and a graduation from a school with a baseline score will start to be one of the only indicators of ability.
3. Stop preventing high schools from teaching remedial classes. We get a kid reading at 3rd grade level, we still have to put in in a standard 9th grade class reading Romeo and Juliet. Ditto math. In fact, we should dramatically expand the high school options to be less college bound and more fun.
Well, this is enough. In fact, maybe I should just turn it into a blog post, given my writer's block!
I'd kill SPED/IDEA money altogether except for those with a low IQ not caused by a genetic or birth abnormality (a difference that is often referred to as familial vs organic retardation, but today isn't allowed to have a polite description). That is, most learning disabilities are a joke that were never intended to be part of IDEA until the ADA came around. And most severely "retarded" kids with genetic abnormalities or birth defects should not be part of the public school budget at all.
All the data is wrong. Test prep was never useless. The data showing it had no improvement was on average. Some kids get huge improvement, others a bit, others do worse. So parents aren't idiots, they played the odds.
Well, I was in test prep for 15 years, teaching seven tests to a huge range of demographics, and saw three changes in the SAT and I know a lot more about this than you do, so have a nice day talking to someone who is more your speed.
Some people go into spontaneous remission. You’re saying your cancer cure works because “some” people benefit tremendously. When we look at the data, your miracle cure doesn’t cause people to go into spontaneous remission any more often than the control group.
Data scientist here (normally I wouldn't open with that, but you seem to love arguments from authority). BronxZooCobra is right, and you can't ignore their comment.
Suppose thirty students take the SAT on day 1,
Then they take a TicTac on day 2,
Then they re-write the SAT on day 3.
Some will do better, some will do worse, some will do the same. But crucially, the average will be the same, because the TicTac didn't do anything. The fluctuations are due to randomness rather than some causal effect of the intervention.
However, this did get me thinking - there is actually a very specific set of conditions under which your suggestion makes sense. If we have an intervention that increases the variance without increasing the average (essentially you get more outliers on both sides - the opposite of deBoer's pitcher [0]) and we also have some arbitrary threshold that we need to cross (suppose anything over a 1600 is "good" and anything under is "bad," with zero shades of grey), then provided we expect to get less than 1600 without the intervention, we should be willing to take the test. It won't increase our expected score, but it will increase the probability that we end up over the threshold.
But this seems unlikely. It's very difficult to imagine a mechanism that would reliably increase outliers on both sides (with exactly the same force). If it works at all, what seems more likely is that it works for some and does nothing for others. But in this scenario the average would see a lift.
In any case, I'd be curious to read an FdB primer on the test prep literature.
I don't "argue from authority". I just have a very large sample size.
Your argument about tictacs doesn't work because there's no dispute that a student's test score can vary from day to day. But that variance won't be a dozen or more percentile points. If taking the test twice meant you could take it one day and get in the 60th percentile, take a tictac and then take it again the next day and get EITHER a 45% or 75% percentile score, well, the likely choice would be don't take the test again.
But in fact, what the data shows is that a non-trivial number of people prep for the test using "American" test prep and some go from 60% to 75%, some go from 95% to 99%, some stay within a narrow window (no difference) and some see a score decrease outside the normal window (rare, but it happens).
THat ain't tic tacs. That's test preparation having different results based on the individual, and if many individual kids decide to take the test prep because they might be one of the ones seeing a huge increase, it's worth it because the downside is very likely nothing more than no-change.
I'm not saying "Test prep works because it works sometimes" but "test prep works for a lot of students for a non-trivial, non-tictac, significant score increase, and the downside is test prep but no increase, and lots of people decide their time is worth the risk of a limited downside."
As a non-US person who has never seen as SAT paper before: did these changes affect how easy it is to "teach to the test" - for example were older SATs more of an IQ test and later ones easier to "learn", or did that not make much of a difference?
There's no question that the most recent test is much easier in verbal. And the math questions are very straightforward but require more exposure to advanced math. So simple trig questions, for example, which require exposure to trig but no real intellect required past the knowledge itself.
I believe you're reporting what you experienced as a test prepper honestly. I'll also admit to being a student helped by test prep, since I tended toward underconfidence which could be usually be quelled by more familiarity with test format and some practice "preminders" that, really, I could do this, and I'd probably be OK. (I didn't take test-prep courses, but I had access to secondhand test-prep materials.)
Still, when you call test prep damaging, how exactly do you mean it? In your Wordpress entry, you suggest the problem is some test-takers having access to a culture of test prep that falsely suggests more "merit" than is there. But how big a problem is that?
We do want tests that predict aptitude, but having known some brilliant STEMfolks whose SAT scores weren't outstanding, we seem to be OK with the possibility that tests can be good enough to measure aptitude in the population, even partake in determining individuals' future, while still overlooking some real aptitude. So why would the reverse, falsely identifying an aptitude not really present, be much worse?
You opened with, "While I'm a fan of tests, I've stopped believing in the granular scores." That seems about right. Still, is wasting resources developing non-present talent "identified" by standardized testing such a big problem, especially compared to the opportunity cost and general cost to human dignity of someone's talent being overlooked? Or is it some other problem you're thinking of?
I don't really want to ban test prep because I believe what might be called the American model of test prep is fine. I agree some people benefit from it not because it masks their abilities, but because it allows them to understand the test's objectives, which isn't inherently obvious to everyone.
I also think test prep *does* help, and the same research that people cite as proof that it doesn't shows that many kids get a big boost. The fact that it doesn't help *on average* is meaningless if you're one of the ones who sees a 200 point boost.
What I'm saying is that in America, the Asian version of test prep (practiced almost exclusively by Asian immigrants) isn't a few dozen hours of practice with a few practice tests, but months of practice and dozens of tests, and sometimes years of practice. When a kid who can't speak coherent English can score an 800 on the reading test, it's a problem.
The test is a proxy. It should not misrepresent scores. As I said in that piece, I don't want to ban test prep, and I don't approve of the discrimination against asians. So the only solution I see is to just use test cut scores.
Wouldn't most Americans love an originality component to the SAT? I would.
But sadly, there isn't and disparaging the very talented, but unoriginal will not further your cause. Much of your description of your false-positive student applies to my very shy, precise, self-effacing European/Chinese son. And frankly, I think your writings here are out of your depth and may contribute to the writers block you've complained about for years. My son has difficultly making connections and has limited interests. While I could brag about his mathematical and musical accomplishments beginning at age 9 and continuing through graduate school, I'd prefer not to.
The kind of "test prep" that is outright fraud like getting the questions in advance and then learning them by heart, is even more of a scam but is actually useful to the student in question (assuming they don't get caught).
"If you want to put an end to preference for rich kids, overthrow capitalism. That’s really your only option."
I think you are too quick to dismiss the possibility of social pressure leading to legacy reform. Harvard is a corporation, but that corporation is in the business of managing a precious brand. I could envision a scenario where a large activist movement actually started to harm that brand's reputation - e.g. leftists pressuring their office *not* to hire from schools that have those super racist legacy admissions, more social stigma towards your classmates who choose to attend a school that does.
And I actually think Harvard would be the elite school in the best spot to take advantage of the no-more-legacies world since they have tons of money, so I could see it making a calculated decision here and being the first mover. If Harvard drops legacy admissions but Yale still has them, there's a now social stigma towards picking Yale over Harvard until Yale also drops them, etc. etc. I am not betting this will happen next year, but I don't think it's a ridiculous narrative if the subject picks up steam with activists.
So I think the real question is why the legion of activists *at* these schools haven't taken a greater interest in making this subject a primary goal for campus activism. I think you can probably come up with some pretty cynical reasons why they've chosen to prioritize renaming buildings instead of betraying their roommates and future employers.
Eliminating legacy would get them positive press, but it would almost be worse because people would think “Oh good, they don’t favor rich families anymore.” But all of the other advantages would still be present. They’d find some way to make up for whatever decline in donations happened as a result.
Plus, all the self-congratulation would be insufferable.
Yes, including the line 'legacy admissions are just one of myriad ways that this preference is expressed'. I don't think getting rid of legacy admissions solves everything, but acting like it isn't a step in the right direction to get rid of one of the myriad ways also seems silly.
I don't believe that's what you originally meant, and again, legacies are a very small part of colleges favoring the wealthy, which will continue regardless of whether legacies end.
Look, to clarify, I don't think that a world without legacies is a substantially different place either, mostly for reasons you go into in the article (we're talking about something that affects X thousand of people in America.) But 'we are letting rich people with connections into our school that feeds into American power structures' is a such a clear and open break in social justice that I think it's actually weird that it doesn't get more attention among activists.
HI Freddie, funny that you should mention Goldman. So back in 2013 , LLoyd Blankfein announced his support for gay marriage. I am gay and cynical and was suspicious of motivation.
Note that in 2013, supporting gay marriage was the most expedient way to score mega-suck points with the cultural left.
And I realized that his cultural liberalism aside, supporting gay marriage was one of the many ways that Goldman Sachs polished its public persona in its fight against the kinds of regulations that could have come to pass had Occupy Wall Street and Elizabeth Warren triumphed. Regulations, mind you, that really would have crippled banks' business models and their executive's compensation.
In comparison, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion is like a sloppy bj to business models....requiring basically no change in them and providing great PR. This is why it's everywhere in the corporate world. Low cost mega insurance.
For a certain kind of person, who is overrepresented in the chattering class, the SAT is a test you can only fail. It’s so right-censored you can’t distinguish yourself — if you get a 1600, who cares, that’s just what you were supposed to do. But at the same, if your score is even a little low it’s a shameful disaster. This obviously produces resentment.
I wonder if this isn’t a factor in the “get rid of SAT” discourse. Maybe a lot of people involved just personally resent their experience with the test.
"Most schools are totally tuition-dependent, and thus enrollment-dependent. But the elite few with huge endowments get rich through parent/alumni donations and the interest that they accrue from same. They’re not going to stop finding ways to attract rich kids with rich parents who will swell their coffers."
My question here is - is this solely driven by parents who have a kid that they'd like to be a 'legacy admission' some day, or do people do this just because they ... uh... have warm feelings towards their alma mater or something?
The first explanation seems undercut about the proportion of legacy admissions being quite small and insignificant, but the second implies huge numbers of people who would use some of their hard-earned charitable donations budget on a rich institution that they don't get anything out of. I literally don't know how somebody's mind might work that this seems like a good idea.
They get a lot out of it: warm fuzzies, excpressed appreciation, their name attached (if the gift is big enough) to get reflected glory (Your-name-here Hall at Famous U), etc etc. And a fair number just genuinely want to help out with stuff they think is important (eg biomedical research).
I worked soliciting donations for my work-study in college. The answer is mostly the latter, from my experience.
A lot of people liked the idea that their donation was "helping to provide education" or helping the school remain open. They felt it was their civic duty, having been taught at [college], to help provide funds so [college] would remain open for the future (a viewpoint more prevalent in older people who'd graduated before tuition costs exploded). People who gave large amounts often started scholarships so that they could directly know which students they were helping, or donated towards new facilities where they could see a direct improvement. We were also trained to hassle people that even a small donation of a few dollars would help the school, which was generally effective.
Yep. As always, capitalism ("an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state") is not the problem, it's humans wanting to maximize their own personal situations that's the problem.
I'm probably missing something but I'll ask anyway. I'm having trouble squaring the following: "a Black B-student with a handful of extracurriculars from an average American public high school will be able to get into a vast number of institutions generally and likely into several competitive institutions as well" with "American-born descendants of African slaves fill a scandalously low number of affirmative action seats".
Do you mean "...a scandalously low number *at Harvard*" or comparable institutions? I otherwise don't know what affirmative actions seats would be for if black B-students are getting into most colleges anyway.
There are X number of affirmative action seats, effectively if not explicitly. They let people get into colleges of Y selectivity who would not ordinarily get into them. Whether that gets them into a 50th percentile school they wouldn't have gotten into otherwise or a 90th percentile school, the overall impact on the system is small. For any given applicant to a small elite school, the impact is greater, but again that's a very small minority of applicants who will be fine anyway. Almost any student can get in somewhere. The question is the degree to which moving from one marginally competitive college to another slightly more competitive but still marginally competitive school has meaningful life impacts for that applicant or anyone who lost "their" spot. I'm skeptical.
Ok, but then what is scandalous about it if you feel it doesn't accomplish anything? Is it that it's scandalous that institutions say it's for one thing while using it for something else entirely? I think that would be a totally fair critique and otherwise consistent with everything else you say in the essay. But then you also say you're a "defender of race-based affirmative action" yourself despite also seeming to be of the opinion that it doesn't do anything. And so I remain confused. Why are you a defender of it if you are skeptical about it actually doing anything?
Thank you for linking to the article on 4-year colleges opposing free community college. They absolutely want those students for themselves—and I am sure that the colleges lobbying against it include nonprofit 4years that pretend to have a big social justice mission.
Some private colleges are even starting their own 2-year programs, acting like it’s this noble service to the poor when really they’re hurting the local community college by competing with them. They’ve figured out that they can run low-cost programs and generate revenue from the students’ financial aid.
Non-selective schools just want students who can pay at all. Even if it just means filling out financial aid forms successfully (a sticking point for more than you’d think…) and passing enough classes to remain eligible for future financial aid.
Not to fixate on Harvard but... Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel proposes that elite colleges (i.e. Harvard) experiment with admitting half the class by lottery and then compare how those students perform compared to the other half of students admitted on the basis of so-called "merit." (The lottery would be after an initial weeding out of blatantly unqualified applicants).
> but there’s every reason to believe that a scandalous amount of the affirmative action slots at elite colleges are going to wealthy international students from Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria
I don't think that's true, colleges are not supposed to include international students in their racial demographics, e.g. https://oir.harvard.edu/files/huoir/files/harvard_cds_2019-2020.pdf
I have no idea if Freddie's right or not but what you cite here isn't the same as what he's describing. These demographics are describing students who are *already admitted*. It says nothing about how those admissions were governed in the first place.
Right but if Harvard or wherever wants to publicly claim x% of its class is Black, admitting rich African students won't help it get there, so why would they bother giving admissions preference to those kids?
Because (for example) 'we admitted x% Black affirmative action students from a total pool of z applicants' is a separate measure from 'y% of the student body is, according to this one metric, Black'.
Again, not saying you are right or wrong, but one takeaway from Freddie's piece is that admissions are Serious Business, and top schools with multi-billion dollar endowments have a phalanx of staff whose job it is to massage these figures while keeping the money coming in. To me, it's *less* believable that there's one Black undergraduate number to rule them all than it is there are multiple figures to match whatever the question is.
Your faith that they actually follow those rules in practice is misguided.
lol
Excellent post, top to bottom. The endless focus on either legacy or "anti-White/anti-Asian" admissions at a vanishingly small number of schools with highly competitive admissions processes, at the expense of the overwhelming percentage of college-bound students and the finances that go into them... it's like watching the Great Fire of Chicago and worrying about a cigarette lighter. But like you say, the media only cares about the top schools, and commentators only care about facile examples they can use to back up their politics.*
Higher education is full of misaligned incentives the whole way through and as long as they are aligned with financial goals that will continue to be the case. The top schools will go for the student who matches a donor profile. All other schools will stack students to the rafters for the immediate tuition check.
*And here's mine: public universities in this country should be much more selective and much cheaper, and states should reallocate a lot of funding for these schools to either vocational schools or something else entirely. Education as a training ground for an enlightened citizenry is passé; if college is to be economic and vocational then let the resource allocation match the goal.
College has become the rubber stamp needed for a white collar job. None of the jobs I've done have involved anything I've done in college, and most people in white collar degree-mandatory jobs have the same story. Even in the highly technical courses, like engineering, people often tell me it has little do with their schooling.
If these white collar jobs are necessary (question for another day), I think there needs to be a route towards them that doesn't require four years and a billion dollars of student loan debt.
You're right. I'm talking past the sale a bit. "Must have a Bachelor's" is very prevalent and very depressing. I guess in my world, if my suggestion took place, many employers would find themselves unable to find people with a Bachelor's and would adjust accordingly.
Agreed. I really had no interest in college and just went because that's what suburban upper-middle class kids do. I think people like me should not be in colleges.
Peter Thiel's politics and moral views are truly cretinous, but I think he and his think-tanks are right in predicting that the apprenticeship model is due for a dramatic comeback in most professional fields. Conditional employment with mentorship and a gradual escalation of responsibilities is just a more sensible way to go about hiring candidates than skimming their college transcript and a round of interviews that mostly tests how good they are at bullshitting you.
Are there ways this arrangement could be catastrophically bad for workers? Of course! Is rampant, escalating credentialism any better, though?
I have another comment on this post about interviews. I agree, it's not a good criteria. I think it mostly tests whether the hiring manager likes you.
As for the apprenticeship piece, I'm not so sure. I think companies are happy to offload the cost of the more general training onto the university system. I also think (unlike Thiel, I imagine) that corporate offices are incredibly slow to adapt and close-minded, so I can see even obvious changes never occurring.
I think a legitimate apprenticeship program might save some money in that it saves the cost of the new hires that don't work out. One job I had, civil service-type exam to get in but the workplace knew that a lot of candidates who passed the exam wouldn't be good at the job. So the "training" program was part apprenticeship and part covert emotional abuse, to get rid of the people they didn't like/who weren't fast enough, without triggering the union protections.
Something where they could hire people on criteria in addition the exam, and make a commitment to those people, invest in their success, that would have saved them thousands of dollars in paying for people who were "attritioned"(that should be a word).
Offices could have gone remote 5 years ago but didn't. Most of these "full time remote jobs" would still be in an office if it weren't for COVID. I just don't see businesses making major changes.
My husband is a senior IT analyst running a public safety network. His undergraduate degree was in Ancient Greek and Hebrew. The cyber security training he received in an elite Navy program as a young adult (married with a child) is what prepared him for this job. He says lots of IT people find their undergrad degrees less than great preparation for actual jobs in part because tech changes so fast.
Sure, but show me two job applicants, both with the Navy cyber training but just one of whom ALSO has a degree in Ancient Greek and Hebrew, and which one am I going to want to hire?
Signaling, signaling, signaling, that's what college is for.
Show me two job applicants with the Navy cyber training but one of them had the motivation, self-discipline, and intelligence required to learn two difficult dead languages, which are you going to choose?
Look, I'm with Freddie on most of what he says in this post, but you're "signaling" narrative in these comments really goes too far. You're basically claiming that learning complex subject matter has no value unless directly related to the buttons one pushes at work, and that's bizarrely cynical and false.
That's true, but the counterfactual isn't four years of cytogenetic freezing. There's probably a better system for this than universities.
I'm struggling to figure out what you don't agree with me about. Maybe it's the intrinsic value of spending four years learning a couple of dead languages, as opposed to the signaling value of showing that you are capable of such a feat?
I'm all for learning for learning's sake, if someone wants to devote the time effort and money to it. (And college is WAY too expensive these days.)
We are agreed on the too expensive part. I guess we're not agreed on the intrinsic value of the liberal arts stuff.
I'm often a co-author on papers that have many co-authors, and I'm often one of the only ones that can write well enough to edit the manuscript (and "edit" means "re-write all the incoherent parts"). Did I need to learn Greek to do that? Not necessarily, but I would have needed to do something else frivolously liberal artsy to learn to write.
Similarly, part of my role at the university is to teach computational skills to incoming biomedical graduate students. Many people in my field are not good teachers. Did I need to learn Greek to teach well? Not necessarily, but it helped--I know a lot of miscellaneous stuff about education and rhetoric that comes in handy, and I was a junior high Latin teacher for a few years. My colleagues who took a more direct approach on this career path, e.g. studying computer science as undergraduates, tend to be bad at writing, teaching, and public speaking.
Sometimes I look back and think I wasted some years and would be further along in my career had I taken a more direct path, but generally I feel like liberal arts departments do a pretty good job teaching students how to write, speak, and teach, that I got something valuable that my STEM-only colleagues lack. I hope we can fix the education system without wrecking the parts that do work fairly well.
More than once he’s expressed a degree of regret for his undergrad choices, both because of debt and because of the seeming irrelevance to job skills. I’ve been the one always talking up the positives—including having met me there :) That being said, he’s finally about to receive debt forgiveness for the $9,000 he’s got left in loans, 15+ years after graduation, because Biden’s policies allowed him to transfer his loans to the “right” kind (there’s a program for debt forgiveness of federal loans if you work in public service for 10 years and make 100+ monthly payments. Until Biden, it was notoriously difficult to actually meet the very narrow standards; he had the “wrong” kind of federal loan, and before he couldn’t change it and still have all the years and payments count toward the forgiveness.)
I hear that. The money side of all this is just horrific.
I have friends with tenure at small liberal arts colleges who still have over $50k in debt and who feel terrible about seeing most of their students similarly ensnared in debt. It appears that most of these institutions will not survive the next financial downturn--most of the students they are admitting are not college ready and don't even need a college education, so this will not be a huge loss. Hopefully they won't all just be replaced by for-profit schools that harvest federal funding.
I do research at a very large, somewhat rural red state R1 university that's good academically and not very expensive. It would have been too homophobic an environment for me back in the 90s when I was looking at schools, but things have changed, and I feel like it's actually a relatively good deal at $12k/year and widespread, generous financial aid. I'm sure financial aid could and should be made more generous, but I don't generally feel like the place should be burned to the ground and replaced with something drawn up along more utopian lines.
I have a huge amount of affection for my small liberal arts college education. I used my degree in English in the newspaper industry for a few years. (In a big pivot, I’m working toward a BS in nursing now.) So having the experience of both a private liberal arts education AND a public science education, I still don’t regret it. I would never want to see the option go away; I would like to see lots of other training options for people like, say, my brother, who has tons of debt and no degree because college wasn’t a good fit.
The real question is whether the number of open positions makes that question relevant. If there are enough unfilled spots then the guy with only the Navy training and the college grad both get jobs.
I'm in data science with a MA in Classics. You're underestimating the overlap between the subjects. After the first time you learn something arbitrary and complex with no direct relevance to your daily life (e.g. Greek grammar, computer programming), well you find out that you can do it repeatedly. I can't think of any better preparation for learning IT crap than having learned dead languages.
Ha! Great point. But then, isn’t that once again indicating the relevance of seemingly irrelevant liberal humanities education?
When I first got into tech years ago the NY Times ran an editorial bitching that nobody in the industry spoke French anymore. There is a long tradition in tech of the industry hoovering up anybody who could do the work regardless of what their major was or even if they had a degree.
This has always been the case with IT, although *not* with the more prestigious tech development jobs. That is, working IT at a securities firm vs getting a gig at Google, Apple, or Facebook.
It depends. Never graduating is viewed as a sort of badge of honor in some quarters, probably because there are so many famous figures in tech who did the same (Jobs/Gates/Zuckerberg/etc.).
The route has to be difficult in order to demonstrate commitment and work ethic, otherwise it fails its signaling function, which is the primary function of college.
However, the billion dollars in debt is a relatively recent phenomenon and does seem like an unnecessary aspect of it.
I agree with the signaling point. But 1) Does it need to be four years and so much of your time during those four years? and 2) Is it even a good idea to put resources into providing signals for hiring managers?
I would say 1) no and 2) no.
“ None of the jobs I've done have involved anything I've done in college”
Jumping though hoops, filing out the right forms, proving you’ve learned stuff is not part of your white collar job? Interesting.
The military accomplishes the same thing, but without all the debt. And in fact, with lots of benefits. But how one feels about the military is another conversation.
This is one of those instances when it is CRUCIAL to differentiate Black from African. Data on Black Americans actually UNDERSTATES their level of social and economic marginalization because it groups actual Black Americans (I.E. descendents of pre-Civil Rights Act Americans) and African Americans (individuals who immigrated from Africa post CRA) when African Americans are economically doing pretty damn well in the US.
I find it hard to care about debates concerning "fair" criteria for who gets a limited number of comfy upper-middle class spots. I don't really put a lot of thought into who should get go to Harvard or who should get to be CFO of a fortune 500. Should it be only quantifiable talent? Should we have affirmative action to make up for historical injustices or implicit bias? I dunno. Does it matter to 99% of the population? Probably not
As Matt Yglesias put it: meritocracy is bad. I'd rather improve the bottom than squabble over the criteria of the top.
Excellent, excellent post. Minor, minor quibble:
"... debt burden is skewed towards the marginal students who lack the human capital to then pay back that debt...".
Hate the term "human capital", like fingernails on blackboard hate (are there blackboards any more?).
Labor and capital are opposed. The poor souls that go into college debt end up laboring to pay that back (sometimes forever). They have as virtually no capital of which to speak.
Off the soapbox, great post. I'll go have a cup of coffee.
The part about SAT/ACT vs GPA/wholistic criteria reminds me about a different blogpost. This one is about interviewing rather than college admissions: https://ryxcommar.com/2020/10/19/on-being-an-interviewer/
Since most people won't read it, here's the key quote.
"Let’s say for example I have a process for hiring that was super transparent and also has no correlation with future performance. I show people the process’s internal logic: turns out, I’m just randomly sorting the list of N candidates and picking the first M candidates in that list.
Now let’s say I implement another process for choosing candidates. It’s just me making decisions based on my gut. Turns out, my gut is also no better than average and my gut choices have no correlation with future performance either.
[...] Despite that, if I implement the latter process nobody at my company would bat an eye, and if I implemented the former process I’d get fired on the spot for being not serious."
In short, I think people overrate the value of their discretion.
It's not like being a self-underrating person helps success.
To the extent any "success" research is believable to begin with, it seems to show the best way to make use of what you've got is to overestimate its value just a little.
The pressures on K-12 education seem to often run directly counter to the situations faced by universities.
In one of my multiple brushes with higher ed I tutored college students in an introductory alegbra class. It was a gatekeeping class in that majors required it which probably didn't need to require it and some students had to take it 3 times. What I noticed from those students was that the math disconnect often started in 3rd grade. Memorizing the multiplication tables. Without having the multiplication facts, division got stumbly. Without division, fractions got very slow. Least common multiple and greatest common factor were knee deep in the sand and then quadratic equations, graphing and algebra were impossible.
The usual US education strategy of "pass them with a C" creates this. Because C means they didn't understand 25% of it and for subjects that are very cumulative, building on prior knowledge, that 25% builds up fast.
I think math remediation still lives in special ed-IEP land, though. Which means a different funding stream and lots of evals and testing, which the child must do poorly on in order to qualify. A student with C/D grades in math with no "disabilities" may not be eligible for school-based math help.
Some tutoring programs are trying to change this, which is good.
But before a student gets to college and discovers they can't do enough algebra to get their EMT certificate or something, even an English teaching degree, there has been a lot of buck-passing in the K-12.
I was a math tutor for years. I think there was buck-passing in both K-12 and community colleges. No idea what goes in the latter, never attended one myself, but those people did not come in with requisite math knowledge.
Yes.
IIRC math was supposed to accomplish several things at once. Learning how to solve problems, learning how to be rigorous in your written work (checking, looking for mistakes) and learning how to think structurally.
So even if the degree wasn't going to "use" the quadratic equation, the years of gymnastics leading up to it were supposed to make the student more fit.
That makes sense to a point, but if so many people are exiting the end of the K-12 pipe without the skills/rigor/fitness, manifesting primarily in the math classes, it becomes a social drain because people who would otherwise be able to get middle-class jobs, teachers, health care, don't do it.
I'm not sure this is a solution but at some point if they separate "math track" versus "non-math track" students, sometime around middle school, with generous leeway for students who still wanted to do math and were willing to work hard at it even if they weren't good at it - it might free up some pressure and suffering. The "apprenticeship" idea might really work here, the "math track" would be a sort of STEM apprenticeship.
I think some colleges just stopped requiring algebra.
The reading is another weird scene.
The schools don't want to fight with the kids, parents, and Scholastic Book Fair, so they buy lots of picture books (all the way up through 6 at least - I love graphic novels, but it is a different skill set).
"I think some colleges just stopped requiring algebra."
Call it "STEM Master Race" if you want, but if someone can't do algebra, I'm skeptical of their thinking skills being any good in the subjects they do pass.
That’s another part of the conversation, yes. Saying “thinking is overrated” is a disastrous way to put it. But there are many necessary human activities that don’t require those skills. Someone with math thinking skills may do better at it, for some fields it seems orthogonal - like cooking, landscaping, fine arts, etc.
In terms of philosophy, law, yes, doing poorly in math would be an indicator. That type of thinking matters for many things.
And there is a sorting going on based on STEM aptitude and performance, for sure. If they need the rest of humanity, and what for, that’ll be interesting to watch develop. Right now I think maybe they don’t need 6 billion of us after all.
I also wonder if this causes some of the half-baked ideas that get discussed on this blog. In my experience, I don't see a whole lot of STEM or philosophy people worrying about "cultural appropriation" or other weird campus activism crap. That seems resigned to the people that probably lack basic math skills
I mostly understand the things like “cultural appropriation.” I don’t always agree with the proposed remedies though. One way to look at it is the progression of monetization of every aspect of culture. People feel cheated when someone from the out group makes a mediocre version of something and then sells it/gets paid, gains status with their in group or both. People may feel cheated even if it’s a good version or something interesting somehow, or if there isn’t much money made. If the out group punishes them when they do the cultural thing, but when their own people do it they shower praise and money, that’s at the very least hypocritical and can be pointed out.
STEM has a long history of being international. STEM culture, such as it is, values appropriation of concepts and ideas, seeks it, even. So “appropriation” as bad will seem backward.
STEM culture is still situated within nation-based societies though. Campuses can feel really toxic for so many reasons; “this feels toxic” is not a priority of every STEM major but it is for some. The activism is probably making it more toxic in different ways rather than less toxic, though.
America eats its young, I first heard that in the 90s and I’d say it’s still true. I thought certain problems were solvable, now I’m not so sure.
"if someone can't do algebra, I'm skeptical of their thinking skills being any good in the subjects they do pass." I know people who were not good at math, but very very good at writing and at college. I do not believe they should have been weeded out for their math badness.
You probably also saw the whole ACEs/PTSD/concentration problems/math struggles thing. I mostly saw it in classmates but for some students, life chaos impacts their focus significantly. We need a kind of memory/concentration rehab for youth.
I can speak to community college. The problem is that for many students, remediation doesn’t work. They fail (sometimes 2-3 times) and then drop out.
There are exceptions of course, and some of the interventions seem to have modest effects. But the passing rates are terrible. Even when they pass, instructors in the next level complain that they aren’t ready.
" Even when they pass, instructors in the next level complain that they aren’t ready."
I might not have been clear, but this is the group I'm talking about. I tutored at a 4-year, and we had students who passed whatever was at their community college but clearly didn't know enough very much
Good lord, this is like an index to my writing over the past ten years. I agree with almost everything said, although I'd quibble here:
"which is apparently undesirable for social reasons and for fear that these Asian students represent stiff academic competition"
It is *definitely* undesirable for social reasons, and there's not much fear that the Asian students represent academic competition. Asian education culture is extremely unattractive to Americans (of all races) and as you say, colleges want rich whites to donate. They're fine with rich Asians donating, far less fine with admitting hundreds of recent Asian immigrants with unwealthy parents who spent 8 years prepping for the SAT while simultaneously in three years of prep for the SHSAT. I wrote about white flight from high school test-based admissions schools. Many others have noticed that all the schools that ended testing have or will become much more white. Far less mentioned is that whites aren't *interested* in the schools. This is most clearly observable in NYC, as they show the testing rates. Whites and Asians have very similar admissions rates and represent the same percentage of the NYC public school population, but Asians test at twice the rate of whites (and it's a safe bet that a good chunk of the whites are immigrants.) So while people bewail the change as cynical, it is to me a fair question why any community should spend a lot of money on a test-based school that is primarily used by immigrants. The next question is why bother having test-based schools at all, of course. Article: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/08/01/white-flight-from-admissions-test-high-schools/
While I'm a fan of tests, I've stopped believing in the granular scores. Kind of like IQ. The difference between a 600 and 800 SAT math score is irrelevant until you tell me how much each one prepped. But the difference between a 400 and a 600--even a 500 and a 600--is much more relevant. In much the same way that the difference between a 115 and 130 IQ isn't something I'd bank on, but 90 and 115 is relevant. Asian test prep did much to kill my faith in high scores as an absolute indicator. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/09/18/false-positives/
One of the undercovered aspects of the college fraud story was the College Board couldn't promise the reliability of its test scores. Proctors were bribed to complete the test. Moreover, the College Board doesn't like spending money creating a separate international test, so it just reuses old American ones--that information gets out very quickly the day of the test, and the international prep companies have provided their kids with all the old copies of the test to memorize. So the day of the test, the info on which test is sent out to millions of testers, who just regurgitate the answers they memorized for that test. (Or they are just sent the answers to copy down if they pay extra for a jijing). Wrote about this here https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/12/31/the-sat-is-corrupt-no-one-wants-to-know/ and here https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/the-sat-is-corrupt-reuters-version/
I found this appalling, because the College Board and other academic tests were about the only ones that were left to be somewhat secure. Microsoft and other tech companies pay a fortune to kind of sort of protect the integrity of their certification tests. Whenever someone says we should end college and just use certification or credential tests, I laugh. Reliable tests cost a fortune to produce. To make tests really safe, you'd have to be sure that no questions got out, no format got out, and everyone taking the test was only interested in the certification. And even then, you'd have to isolate the testers for 24 hours after the test so they couldn't brain dump.
While the failure rate of students who take on huge loans is a tragedy, at least those people are doing it by choice. Far worse societally is the fact the college degree is becoming ruined as any sort of academic marker. Freddie mentioned remediation--but colleges are doing away with remediation. the entire state university systems in California and Tennessee had done away with them several years ago, but the push to abolish the SAT will make that even more prevalent. I wrote about it here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2017/04/15/corrupted-college/
This is hands down the largest issue. Its's getting worse, too. We need far fewer colleges.
The fixes are all impossible and would fail disparate impact tests:
1. Use federal oversight to stop all colleges from accepting unqualified candidates. Congress should set a minimum demonstrated ability level federally guaranteed loans--say, an ACT section score of 23, an SAT score of 550 (or even 500). Pell grants, too, should have a minimum. If you don't think this will make a difference, you are unaware of the depths of illiterate that colleges are stooping to.
If we could couple it with federally financed vocational centers that are NOT about sexy skills, but boring stuff like learning to be a short order cook or nurse's aide, or dental hygeniests, and then give loans to that, it might pass muster. I'm skeptical,though. Wrote about vocational ideas here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/vocational-ed-advancing-the-debate/(by the way, people always overrate our history of vocational ed. We've never had a golden age: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/vocational-ed-and-the-elephant/)
2. The big fix that might work is at the state level. I would love to see some red states require a minimum ACT/SAT score and get past the lawsuit. If things get as bad as I fear, college degrees are going to become worthless, and a graduation from a school with a baseline score will start to be one of the only indicators of ability.
3. Stop preventing high schools from teaching remedial classes. We get a kid reading at 3rd grade level, we still have to put in in a standard 9th grade class reading Romeo and Juliet. Ditto math. In fact, we should dramatically expand the high school options to be less college bound and more fun.
Well, this is enough. In fact, maybe I should just turn it into a blog post, given my writer's block!
#3 definitely yes. Remediation needs a funding stream separate from special ed/IDEA act money and disability diagnosis gatekeeping.
I'll check out your other links!
I'd kill SPED/IDEA money altogether except for those with a low IQ not caused by a genetic or birth abnormality (a difference that is often referred to as familial vs organic retardation, but today isn't allowed to have a polite description). That is, most learning disabilities are a joke that were never intended to be part of IDEA until the ADA came around. And most severely "retarded" kids with genetic abnormalities or birth defects should not be part of the public school budget at all.
All the data says test prep is practically useless. It’s basically a scam.
All the data is wrong. Test prep was never useless. The data showing it had no improvement was on average. Some kids get huge improvement, others a bit, others do worse. So parents aren't idiots, they played the odds.
However, Asian test prep is of a whole different nature and it changed my belief in whether test prep could be damaging. And hey, I wrote about that, too: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/09/18/false-positives/
The same would be true with taking the test twice. Nothing you are saying wouldn’t also be true if test prep didn’t work.
Well, I was in test prep for 15 years, teaching seven tests to a huge range of demographics, and saw three changes in the SAT and I know a lot more about this than you do, so have a nice day talking to someone who is more your speed.
Some people go into spontaneous remission. You’re saying your cancer cure works because “some” people benefit tremendously. When we look at the data, your miracle cure doesn’t cause people to go into spontaneous remission any more often than the control group.
You’re smart enough to realize this…
Data scientist here (normally I wouldn't open with that, but you seem to love arguments from authority). BronxZooCobra is right, and you can't ignore their comment.
Suppose thirty students take the SAT on day 1,
Then they take a TicTac on day 2,
Then they re-write the SAT on day 3.
Some will do better, some will do worse, some will do the same. But crucially, the average will be the same, because the TicTac didn't do anything. The fluctuations are due to randomness rather than some causal effect of the intervention.
However, this did get me thinking - there is actually a very specific set of conditions under which your suggestion makes sense. If we have an intervention that increases the variance without increasing the average (essentially you get more outliers on both sides - the opposite of deBoer's pitcher [0]) and we also have some arbitrary threshold that we need to cross (suppose anything over a 1600 is "good" and anything under is "bad," with zero shades of grey), then provided we expect to get less than 1600 without the intervention, we should be willing to take the test. It won't increase our expected score, but it will increase the probability that we end up over the threshold.
But this seems unlikely. It's very difficult to imagine a mechanism that would reliably increase outliers on both sides (with exactly the same force). If it works at all, what seems more likely is that it works for some and does nothing for others. But in this scenario the average would see a lift.
In any case, I'd be curious to read an FdB primer on the test prep literature.
[0] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/short-week-the-stupid-baseball-hypothetical
I don't "argue from authority". I just have a very large sample size.
Your argument about tictacs doesn't work because there's no dispute that a student's test score can vary from day to day. But that variance won't be a dozen or more percentile points. If taking the test twice meant you could take it one day and get in the 60th percentile, take a tictac and then take it again the next day and get EITHER a 45% or 75% percentile score, well, the likely choice would be don't take the test again.
But in fact, what the data shows is that a non-trivial number of people prep for the test using "American" test prep and some go from 60% to 75%, some go from 95% to 99%, some stay within a narrow window (no difference) and some see a score decrease outside the normal window (rare, but it happens).
THat ain't tic tacs. That's test preparation having different results based on the individual, and if many individual kids decide to take the test prep because they might be one of the ones seeing a huge increase, it's worth it because the downside is very likely nothing more than no-change.
I'm not saying "Test prep works because it works sometimes" but "test prep works for a lot of students for a non-trivial, non-tictac, significant score increase, and the downside is test prep but no increase, and lots of people decide their time is worth the risk of a limited downside."
As a non-US person who has never seen as SAT paper before: did these changes affect how easy it is to "teach to the test" - for example were older SATs more of an IQ test and later ones easier to "learn", or did that not make much of a difference?
There's no question that the most recent test is much easier in verbal. And the math questions are very straightforward but require more exposure to advanced math. So simple trig questions, for example, which require exposure to trig but no real intellect required past the knowledge itself.
I believe you're reporting what you experienced as a test prepper honestly. I'll also admit to being a student helped by test prep, since I tended toward underconfidence which could be usually be quelled by more familiarity with test format and some practice "preminders" that, really, I could do this, and I'd probably be OK. (I didn't take test-prep courses, but I had access to secondhand test-prep materials.)
Still, when you call test prep damaging, how exactly do you mean it? In your Wordpress entry, you suggest the problem is some test-takers having access to a culture of test prep that falsely suggests more "merit" than is there. But how big a problem is that?
We do want tests that predict aptitude, but having known some brilliant STEMfolks whose SAT scores weren't outstanding, we seem to be OK with the possibility that tests can be good enough to measure aptitude in the population, even partake in determining individuals' future, while still overlooking some real aptitude. So why would the reverse, falsely identifying an aptitude not really present, be much worse?
You opened with, "While I'm a fan of tests, I've stopped believing in the granular scores." That seems about right. Still, is wasting resources developing non-present talent "identified" by standardized testing such a big problem, especially compared to the opportunity cost and general cost to human dignity of someone's talent being overlooked? Or is it some other problem you're thinking of?
I don't really want to ban test prep because I believe what might be called the American model of test prep is fine. I agree some people benefit from it not because it masks their abilities, but because it allows them to understand the test's objectives, which isn't inherently obvious to everyone.
I also think test prep *does* help, and the same research that people cite as proof that it doesn't shows that many kids get a big boost. The fact that it doesn't help *on average* is meaningless if you're one of the ones who sees a 200 point boost.
What I'm saying is that in America, the Asian version of test prep (practiced almost exclusively by Asian immigrants) isn't a few dozen hours of practice with a few practice tests, but months of practice and dozens of tests, and sometimes years of practice. When a kid who can't speak coherent English can score an 800 on the reading test, it's a problem.
The test is a proxy. It should not misrepresent scores. As I said in that piece, I don't want to ban test prep, and I don't approve of the discrimination against asians. So the only solution I see is to just use test cut scores.
Wouldn't most Americans love an originality component to the SAT? I would.
But sadly, there isn't and disparaging the very talented, but unoriginal will not further your cause. Much of your description of your false-positive student applies to my very shy, precise, self-effacing European/Chinese son. And frankly, I think your writings here are out of your depth and may contribute to the writers block you've complained about for years. My son has difficultly making connections and has limited interests. While I could brag about his mathematical and musical accomplishments beginning at age 9 and continuing through graduate school, I'd prefer not to.
If your shy, precise, self-effacing European/Chinese son is intelligent and doesn't require test prep, nothing I say applies to him.
"And frankly, I think your writings here are out of your depth and may contribute to the writers block you've complained about for years."
That's neither frank nor accurate. But unsurprising.
The kind of "test prep" that is outright fraud like getting the questions in advance and then learning them by heart, is even more of a scam but is actually useful to the student in question (assuming they don't get caught).
"If you want to put an end to preference for rich kids, overthrow capitalism. That’s really your only option."
I think you are too quick to dismiss the possibility of social pressure leading to legacy reform. Harvard is a corporation, but that corporation is in the business of managing a precious brand. I could envision a scenario where a large activist movement actually started to harm that brand's reputation - e.g. leftists pressuring their office *not* to hire from schools that have those super racist legacy admissions, more social stigma towards your classmates who choose to attend a school that does.
And I actually think Harvard would be the elite school in the best spot to take advantage of the no-more-legacies world since they have tons of money, so I could see it making a calculated decision here and being the first mover. If Harvard drops legacy admissions but Yale still has them, there's a now social stigma towards picking Yale over Harvard until Yale also drops them, etc. etc. I am not betting this will happen next year, but I don't think it's a ridiculous narrative if the subject picks up steam with activists.
So I think the real question is why the legion of activists *at* these schools haven't taken a greater interest in making this subject a primary goal for campus activism. I think you can probably come up with some pretty cynical reasons why they've chosen to prioritize renaming buildings instead of betraying their roommates and future employers.
Overthrowing capitalism ain't gonna work either. Who do think got preferential admission to Moscow State back in the day?
Eliminating legacy would get them positive press, but it would almost be worse because people would think “Oh good, they don’t favor rich families anymore.” But all of the other advantages would still be present. They’d find some way to make up for whatever decline in donations happened as a result.
Plus, all the self-congratulation would be insufferable.
... did you read the post?
Yes, including the line 'legacy admissions are just one of myriad ways that this preference is expressed'. I don't think getting rid of legacy admissions solves everything, but acting like it isn't a step in the right direction to get rid of one of the myriad ways also seems silly.
I don't believe that's what you originally meant, and again, legacies are a very small part of colleges favoring the wealthy, which will continue regardless of whether legacies end.
Look, to clarify, I don't think that a world without legacies is a substantially different place either, mostly for reasons you go into in the article (we're talking about something that affects X thousand of people in America.) But 'we are letting rich people with connections into our school that feeds into American power structures' is a such a clear and open break in social justice that I think it's actually weird that it doesn't get more attention among activists.
Sure, agreed.
HI Freddie, funny that you should mention Goldman. So back in 2013 , LLoyd Blankfein announced his support for gay marriage. I am gay and cynical and was suspicious of motivation.
Note that in 2013, supporting gay marriage was the most expedient way to score mega-suck points with the cultural left.
And I realized that his cultural liberalism aside, supporting gay marriage was one of the many ways that Goldman Sachs polished its public persona in its fight against the kinds of regulations that could have come to pass had Occupy Wall Street and Elizabeth Warren triumphed. Regulations, mind you, that really would have crippled banks' business models and their executive's compensation.
In comparison, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion is like a sloppy bj to business models....requiring basically no change in them and providing great PR. This is why it's everywhere in the corporate world. Low cost mega insurance.
For a certain kind of person, who is overrepresented in the chattering class, the SAT is a test you can only fail. It’s so right-censored you can’t distinguish yourself — if you get a 1600, who cares, that’s just what you were supposed to do. But at the same, if your score is even a little low it’s a shameful disaster. This obviously produces resentment.
I wonder if this isn’t a factor in the “get rid of SAT” discourse. Maybe a lot of people involved just personally resent their experience with the test.
Oh 100%
I'd say it's bigger than the SAT--an expectation of perfection is seemingly present in almost every part of our culture.
"Most schools are totally tuition-dependent, and thus enrollment-dependent. But the elite few with huge endowments get rich through parent/alumni donations and the interest that they accrue from same. They’re not going to stop finding ways to attract rich kids with rich parents who will swell their coffers."
My question here is - is this solely driven by parents who have a kid that they'd like to be a 'legacy admission' some day, or do people do this just because they ... uh... have warm feelings towards their alma mater or something?
The first explanation seems undercut about the proportion of legacy admissions being quite small and insignificant, but the second implies huge numbers of people who would use some of their hard-earned charitable donations budget on a rich institution that they don't get anything out of. I literally don't know how somebody's mind might work that this seems like a good idea.
Sometimes they let you design a dorm
Because the state won't pay for a desperately needed new dorm at that school, with or without windows.
They get a lot out of it: warm fuzzies, excpressed appreciation, their name attached (if the gift is big enough) to get reflected glory (Your-name-here Hall at Famous U), etc etc. And a fair number just genuinely want to help out with stuff they think is important (eg biomedical research).
I worked soliciting donations for my work-study in college. The answer is mostly the latter, from my experience.
A lot of people liked the idea that their donation was "helping to provide education" or helping the school remain open. They felt it was their civic duty, having been taught at [college], to help provide funds so [college] would remain open for the future (a viewpoint more prevalent in older people who'd graduated before tuition costs exploded). People who gave large amounts often started scholarships so that they could directly know which students they were helping, or donated towards new facilities where they could see a direct improvement. We were also trained to hassle people that even a small donation of a few dollars would help the school, which was generally effective.
“If you want to put an end to preference for rich kids, overthrow capitalism”
Then, at least in most communist countries to date, you will have a preference for the kids of party leaders (who are also rich kids).
Yep. As always, capitalism ("an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state") is not the problem, it's humans wanting to maximize their own personal situations that's the problem.
I'm probably missing something but I'll ask anyway. I'm having trouble squaring the following: "a Black B-student with a handful of extracurriculars from an average American public high school will be able to get into a vast number of institutions generally and likely into several competitive institutions as well" with "American-born descendants of African slaves fill a scandalously low number of affirmative action seats".
Do you mean "...a scandalously low number *at Harvard*" or comparable institutions? I otherwise don't know what affirmative actions seats would be for if black B-students are getting into most colleges anyway.
There are X number of affirmative action seats, effectively if not explicitly. They let people get into colleges of Y selectivity who would not ordinarily get into them. Whether that gets them into a 50th percentile school they wouldn't have gotten into otherwise or a 90th percentile school, the overall impact on the system is small. For any given applicant to a small elite school, the impact is greater, but again that's a very small minority of applicants who will be fine anyway. Almost any student can get in somewhere. The question is the degree to which moving from one marginally competitive college to another slightly more competitive but still marginally competitive school has meaningful life impacts for that applicant or anyone who lost "their" spot. I'm skeptical.
Ok, but then what is scandalous about it if you feel it doesn't accomplish anything? Is it that it's scandalous that institutions say it's for one thing while using it for something else entirely? I think that would be a totally fair critique and otherwise consistent with everything else you say in the essay. But then you also say you're a "defender of race-based affirmative action" yourself despite also seeming to be of the opinion that it doesn't do anything. And so I remain confused. Why are you a defender of it if you are skeptical about it actually doing anything?
Thank you for linking to the article on 4-year colleges opposing free community college. They absolutely want those students for themselves—and I am sure that the colleges lobbying against it include nonprofit 4years that pretend to have a big social justice mission.
Some private colleges are even starting their own 2-year programs, acting like it’s this noble service to the poor when really they’re hurting the local community college by competing with them. They’ve figured out that they can run low-cost programs and generate revenue from the students’ financial aid.
Non-selective schools just want students who can pay at all. Even if it just means filling out financial aid forms successfully (a sticking point for more than you’d think…) and passing enough classes to remain eligible for future financial aid.
Not to fixate on Harvard but... Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel proposes that elite colleges (i.e. Harvard) experiment with admitting half the class by lottery and then compare how those students perform compared to the other half of students admitted on the basis of so-called "merit." (The lottery would be after an initial weeding out of blatantly unqualified applicants).