This was a great read. Unfortunately, it seems very rare to address counter arguments in good faith as is done here.
I would propose one addition to #3: SES correlates with academic performance and parental academic performance is also correlated with household SES. There's so much noise here, but I would suggest three things are going on here among the elite: an advantage in material resources, likely a stronger culture of valuing education and some hereditary inheritance of ability. The last point (hereditary inheritance) seems the hardest to talk about (I can feel the thunderclouds forming over my head). It also suggests that there will be some limit in generational economic mobility, i.e. the economic quintile you were born into will almost always be correlated with where you wind up no matter how much redistribution you have.
Well, Sam Harris has spoken eloquently about the fact that we as a society don't have to attach education and wealth as closely as we do. Yes, some people are genetically pre-disposed to science & math. They should be the ones making medicines and inventing shit. Not people who don't know how to engineer stuff. But they don't have to be paid more than everyone else. (There's an argument that they're underpaid to begin with.) Obviously the bigger point is that if you get into Yale you have options. If you don't then you have less options. And less chances of getting out of poverty if you were born into it.
It's complicated. But education should be to educated. It shouldn't be a factory for social and monetary success only.
No argument from me on any of this. Completely agree that the fact that we have an elite class that considers the rest of us to be peons is a much bigger issue than how we pick that elite class.
Here's my technical case along the same lines for the GRE for physics grad school:
Here's some of my work that bolsters your case, although it concerns GRE's rather than SATs. The common theme is the extraordinary lengths of embarrassing pseudo-scientific foolery to which the anti-test types resort.
My one quibble is that I think you've sort of muddled the description of collider stratification bias. It's distinguished from simple range restriction because unlike simple range restriction the stratification induces a correlation between the suspected cause and the other variables with which it collides on the stratified variable. If those other variables are outside the model, that typically induces a negative bias in the coefficient estimate.
"you've sort of muddled the description of collider stratification bias. It's distinguished from simple range restriction"
If so, that's indeed a problem. I think (?) I tried to separate two things - the range restriction problem inherent to entrance exam research in general, and the specific failure to account for colliders in the bad ACT UChicago paper. But it's always possible I screwed up the stats....
My point is that ACT doesn't "collide" with ACT! That sounds like simple range restriction, which ruins signal/noise in finding coefficients. That can be cured by very large N. It collides with other criteria used in admissions, which produces systematically biased coefficient estimates regardless of signal/noise. That can't be cured by large N.
Ugh, thanks. I knew I should have kept it simple.... I had a bit about Berkson's paradox in there too but I took it out for length considerations. Probably for the best.
I think people would be less wary to talk about inherent differences if so many people didn't use them as an excuse to further marginalize minorities. For example, I've seen people argue that it's perfectly reasonable to defund schools in poor neighborhoods because students there have lower academic achievements. Now, I'm not saying you or anyone else who agrees with your point is necessarily in this camp, but it seems unfair to go on about how stupid liberals are being without acknowledging there just might be an actual reason for their attitude. I don't even think the liberals are right about this and frankly, I think the whole education system is broken, I also don't think factors like that should be omitted.
This is a very minor point so I won't go too in depth but as someone currently studying in a STEM field, I can tell you it really does change how you view the world even of it's not what it aims to do. Maybe the CA DoE's incentives are weird but I see teaching math and science as being less about regurgitating facts and applying formulas and more about exploration to be a good thing. It's way closer to what actual scientists do and I belive it does more to encourage students' interest in those fields (I mean, those who aren't already passionate about differential math at age 12 :P). I for sure wasn't as passionate about it until I started my study and realized how interesting it actually is when it's less about memorization.
I don't think you're actually wrong about what the best approach to schooling is, but some arguments you make just bother me and I don't think they really support your cause.
You seem to think Freddie is saying that kids who fail the SAT’s shouldn’t be taught science or math at all. I feel he’s saying the opposite. If kids who don’t have the capacity for a certain level of math or science, but are then admitted into Stuyvesant high school or maybe MIT later, they’re gonna’ fail. They won’t be able to grasp the magic of science.
Now do we need to teach that magic earlier? Yes. But that involves cultural stuff too. If we agree that it’s not genetic in any real way, (which is my take too) then something else is making it so these kids, Black & Latino disproportionately, aren’t getting excited by math and science early enough. Why? I don’t know.
Honestly, my point about STEM stuff was more born out of personal annoyance with the "to teach math as if it is as subjective as literature or art" line because people not in those sorts of fields talking about science as if it's static and about scientists as if they were human fact dispensers peeves me immensely. I actually had that in the comment originally but it got lost in translation, so to speak, when I went back and reworked it because I came off as elitist.
What I was trying to say is that CA's approach didn't seem so bad from the perspective of someone with a bit more advanced knowledge of mathematics. Based on skimming (because I'm not about to read a hundred page government document for an internet argument about something I'm not quite so invested in) it seems that they want to encourage analytical thinking through mathematics.
As for why Black and Latino children might not be so excited by it, maybe being told all their life they're genetically predisposed to be a rube who doesn't grasp science (to put it nicely) kinda crushes that excitement. That's definitely my take on that particular issue.
One last thing: I don't really see how one could hold the opinion that people who fail the SATs shouldn't be taught math or science, because, unless I'm mistaken about which grade we're talking about here, the teaching happens BEFORE the SATs and we haven't invented time machines yet ;p
Hey. Thanks for the response. I hear you about how they teach math. I actually think I have an aptitude for math, but I grew up in the "learn your times tables" era. So I totally lost interest. Whereas my kid, 15 now, grew up with math manipulatives and much more progressive and even "fun" ways of learning math & science. So again, I'm all for that.
That said, again, I don't think Freddie meant math should just be clinical. He's responding more the post modernist take with all the 2+2=5 stuff. (It's a thing.)
Of course that's fringe and people just arguing to argue. But on the point about kids of color falling behind I bet we're 100% in agreement. The fact that they're falling behind is clearly due to legacy of racism and Jim Crow. But that doesn't mean the tests are "racist". The tests here in NYC high schools is for ADVANCED kids. High school and then prep for college. Of course the kids who pass those tests should still be taught science and math. It's just that the odds of becoming a programer or statistical analyst or whatever, become slimmer if you don't grasp it early.
I think we agree more than we realize. To recap: lower schools need to improve *how* they teach math to underpriviliged kids. (It's not just budgets). Agreed?
But as a STEM student yourself you must understand that there are soooo many variables. Educational, cultural, financial, societal and yes even genetics. Which is the point of Freddie's article.
I'll end with this. Here in NY there was an uproar about only 8 black or latino kids getting into Styvesant, (the premiere STEM High School here) getting in when there were hundreds of slots. Look, even if you believed everything people like Charles Murray says about genetics (which I DO NOT for the record), that wouldn't explain such a discrepancy. So what *is* the problem? Is the test racist? That's what AOC (who I actually like even though I disagree with her here) and many other progressives believe. But the evidence says otherwise.
I believe it has to start earlier. Otherwise MIT will just take more kids from privates schools or even other countries. If the tests need to be fixed then fix them. But I'd bet good money that you'd have to do a lot more.
Kids who pass OR FAIL those tests still need math & sciences, is what I meant to say. But there's a difference between truly gifted kids by high school and kids who didn't quite grasp the more complicated stuff. You can't teach all the kids the same stuff after a certain point. The kids who are more creative and less linear wouldn't want that either. (I know I wouldn't). Teach math & science and logic all through school. But don't pretend everyone can be an expert mathematician. It's a fantasy.
"He's responding more the post modernist take with all the 2+2=5 stuff. (It's a thing.)" Ohhhh, I'm not sure we're going to get along. I know what you're referencing and we had very different takeaways. Also, he linked to a specific article about a specific education policy in California and not what you're referencing, which is afaik a twitter thread by some math guy. Ergo, I think it's reasonable to interpret as him talking about that and similar policy decisions, especially considering this whole discourse is about what schools should do, i. e. what policy they should implement. I know this is probably way too pedantic but this is what you get when you talk to people like me (trust me, I hate it too).
And yeah, there's definitely various factors, I just think in this particular context it's important to emphasize the very fact that people will dismiss certain demographics on the basis of race and then justify it with "oh well, I'm just saying there are genetic factors!" affects the outcome. Personally, I think family is another big factor, since that's where children first see role models and most of the time parents have a certain life path they want their kids to take. I don't really know what the common Black or Latino family experience is, but other cultures commonly push their children to be doctors for example, and a lot of people from those cultures do follow that path.
I understood the point of Freddie's article to be "these common arguments against the SATs are wrong, genetics to affect things and there are problems with the whole system that people within it just sort of ignore". That's super condensed but it's what I got. I don't think he's saying ONLY genetics affect the outcome but he is saying that when controlled for other factors, inborn abilities still win out.
Those are pretty much my thoughts. I don't really know what AOC has said, I've only seen people online argue about the myths Freddie addressed in the beginning, and I'm not familiar with the incident you're talking about so I can't speak on it. It could be racist, I don't know! It's being taken in a society where racism is still an issue and current generations are being affected by past injustices as well, so it really should be less about the specific test and more what it says about the society.
I’m a bit confused. Do YOU agree that intellectual ability is at lease partly inheritable? Or are you saying that’s a smokescreen for people who want to retain the status quo?
I think it is almost inevitable that someone somewhere will pick up on anything you say and use it to argue for some bad idea. But I still think we're a lot better off speaking the truth about things like differences in intellectual ability than about telling socially-desirable lies about it.
Definitely, but when so many people misuse an argument, I think it should be addressed. It's kind of like how feminists spent half a decade denying there was any amount of hatred against men in the movement (despite it being present since at least the 2nd wave), the next half of said decade insisting misandrists had nothing to do with them while never actually providing any counterarguments, and they're starting the current decade with "wait guys stop hating men so much, it's getting ridiculous". There could have been a push against the nonsense a long time ago but there wasn't, and if there isn't a push by anti-racists who nonetheless believe genetics are a factor in education, then the same thing is going to happen.
Thinking about it more, I think what I really want is to finally see that essay about race science. The People need it!! Also, on Montessori schools but that's just because I'm curious what people think about them.
Race science is bullshit because race as we know it is a total construct. Genetic differences are real. Racial differences are not. Can we agree on that at least?
Well, yeah, but if you try to tell that to anyone who isn't already caught up to modern race discourse and they'll either look at you like you're a clown or subtweet you with a tweet about how SJWs think there's 0 difference between white people and black people. I really just want to ste- I mean, read and perhaps borrow some arguments that are likely to work against people like that.
It's not that there's no difference between "white & black" people. It's that there's no such thing as "white" or "black" people. There's differences between people. Period. The science is pretty clear on that.
Who do you want to steal arguments from? I only want the argument that's true.
I like this post. I can't say for sure, and you touch briefly on meritocracy in the post, but I sometimes wonder if the resistance to the SAT and GRE is partly because of academia's view of itself as a meritocracy is something like a fundamental belief. As you know, it is not and has probably never been a meritocracy, but when discussed the lack of "true" meritocracy is usually stated as due to external factors preventing it (student wealth, parental connections, bureaucratic reasons, etc.) and only very rarely as due to anything academia itself is doing wrong. To see the SAT and GRE as having validity means that increasing diversity implies lower-ability students are intentionally being admitted over higher-ability students, which poses an existential question to academia even though, as you exactly stated, an academic ability gap does not imply an academic potential gap. Unfortunately, there's not really anything academia can do to erase all the sociocultural bullshit that kids have gone through their past 17+ years driving the ability gap. Which is all just to say, that academia wants to admit a more racially diverse student body (which is a good thing!) but the test results showing an ability gap, if valid, clash with their fundamental self-perception as a meritocracy, hence the tests showing must be invalid in order to preserve the self-perception of meritocracy.
Of course, I'm speculating about the beliefs of wide swaths of people which is always wrong, because the swaths don't believe things, people do.
The other self-perception issue is that few people in academia want to admit that they work in a giant sorting machine for the private sector. If more people came to terms with that, they'd probably be more concerned about making the machine they work for worse at sorting. But if you really just don't believe it, you're not going to be as concerned.
Right - they would like to maintain their illusion that they are fighting the capitalist system when in fact they are (I was) a key cog in that system.
I think if you admit to yourself that college is primarily a large financial investment you're making for career reasons, it becomes harder to justify majoring in English, which maybe you kinda just want to do regardless? So even for the students it becomes a weird milkshake of 'life experience' / 'I love learning' / 'also this is my ticket into the middle class'.
But yeah I think there's a lot of cognitive dissonance across the board on this subject - the college entrance debate itself is nonsensical you don't start with the assumption that we're trying to redistribute a small supply of economically valuable signals for the private sector. The SAT is only relevant to a small subset of selective colleges. The SAT isn't preventing people from getting into *a* college in America...
Specifically, academia functions as an IQ-testing proxy for the benefit of a private sector that is no longer allowed to administer IQ tests to applicants--though that doesn't change the private sector's pressing need for information about the IQ of applicants. Everyone loves to hate on IQ, but it matters. It's not everything; no particular quality is everything. Honesty, perseverance, empathy, all kinds of things will matter in the workplace, but it makes as little sense to pretend that an honest employee will do great even if he completely lacks horsepower as it does to pretend that a genius is going to work out great even though he's a thieving sociopath. Lying isn't going to get us to the political promised land here.
The concept of "academia" as a monolith really has to be broken into at least two pieces, STEM and non-STEM. In STEM academia (where I have 38 years of experience), I claim that absolutely everyone knows that there is a range of inherent ability, that it correlates moderately well with standardized test results (though these are much less useful at the extremes, and there are plenty of exceptions: gifted students who test poorly), and that we are engaged in sorting as a primary function.
Oh, and the vast majority of us have no interest in "fighting the capitalist system", having plenty of interaction with colleagues who are in (or have fled from) communist or socialist systems.
Are there really academic areas where the people working in them don't notice that some people are smarter than others? This seems like the sort of thing that it would take a lot of mental effort not to understand in almost any academic setting.
My view on gifted and talented programs is that they don’t teach smart kids math or writing or whatever but instead they teach effort. I can only speak for myself but I basically sleep-walked through K-12 and undergrad and my masters program. I briefly went off to a masters at UChicago and just did horribly because it was actually vaguely hard and I had basically never put in effort academically at any point in my life. Gifted and talented programs in theory could help kids like that put in effort by forcing them to from a young age instead of coasting to success. This matters because a lack of effort certainly limits your high-end educational and professional out outcomes.
I was pretty bored (and extremely frustrated) thru K-12, and most of college, but I imagine I would have felt even worse had I not also been in the 'gifted' classes.
I was very lucky in that my pre-college school allowed (tho VERY grudgingly) me to go 'beyond' just 'gifted' classes, but it's still (somewhat) amazing that 'educators' would erect ANY obstacles to any student's academic efforts. What's the point of schooling if not that? (Somewhat obviously, that's NOT really the point.)
I attended some accelerated classes in public high school. I'm sure it was helpful to be challenged, so that I learned before I got to college what it meant to have to stretch a bit. Equally important, though, was discovering that classes could be interesting and paced suitably for a student like me, and therefore a lifelong source of intense pleasure and meaning.
It makes no sense to pretend that all students need information delivered to them at the same rate. It's odd how easily we accept the notion that some universities and curricula are dramatically more difficult than others, while blanching at the thought of the same disparities in public high school classes. What's the magic that occurs at age 18?
Thank goodness it will always be difficult to eliminate the role of families in encouraging self-directed learning, or for that matter to prevent young people from becoming confident autodidacts with or without family support. Thank goodness also for internet learning tools, which may be all that will save academically gifted students when the public school system completes its degeneration into madness.
One major thing that I think gets ignored by pretending that some students don't have more ability than others is the damage it does to students and their upward mobility.
Letting a student in who is bright but not overwhelmingly above average into a very rigorous school is a great way to increase their chances of dropping out of college dramatically while at the same time possibly strapping them with student loan debt. The same student may have done very well at a less rigorous school and completed their degree.
The goal of whistling past the graveyard w/r/t to the SAT's ability to predict student success seems to be to create more diverse student bodies with the apparent end goal of improving the outcomes of minority students, but it will almost certainly end up doing the reverse in many cases.
This was one of Malcolm gladwell’s point in David and Goliath. He had a chapter on a student choosing an ivy vs a state school and argued the state school would’ve been better. Better to be a big fish/little pond than little fish/big pond. Idk - have seen the opposite argued as well : that ivies offer connections , contacts and opportunity.
I had a black, presumably low-income classmate in college that was Valedictorian or Salutatorian at his high school with a huge dropout rate. I was nervous working with him because I certainly wasn't in the top 10% of my class (low GPA, but very high SAT and AP scores). It wasn't until I started actually working with him on assignments that I realized how far behind he was in terms of reading and writing and he really struggled in the class. It dawned on me that a 4.0 at one school is not a 4.0 at another school. Not saying he was dumb, just that his school probably had different standards considering the student-body.
So even if they drop the SAT to try to increase the diversity of the student body, my anecdotal experience has shown me that many of them are already so far behind that even if they do get in they're still going to struggle. Sure, some will overcome it, but the learning gap starts at an early age and removing the SAT isn't going to fix that.
"And throwing money at our educational problems, while noble in intent, hasn’t worked. (People react violently to this, but for example poorer and Blacker public schools receive significantly higher per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools, which should not be a surprise given that the policy apparatus has been shoveling money at the racial performance gap for 40 years.)"
I appreciated this piece but I have mixed views on this point: I don't disagree that the studies show what they show in terms of the marginal dollar but in my view to really move the needle you'd need to spend a good deal more money. In Massachusetts, where I live, urban schools that serve Black students are much better funded than in years past, but they still have (i) decrepit physical plants, (ii) no really comprehensive afterschool or summer programming, (iii) school breakfast and lunch programs that are slightly better than prison food, etc. Those things could be fixed, and they should be, but that would cost thousands of dollars per student per year and those investments have not yet been made.
This is a very good point. Do the per-pupil funding stats include facility construction and repair? My guess is that's considered a different budget item. Even if not, the starting point of the physical plant in poor areas is undoubtedly much worse, and so there needs to be a ton of spending to get to even. Then we can start counting dollars per pupil.
Instead of abolishing the SAT, Kendi and others should focus on abolishing Admissions. Open admission schools particularly in STEM fields would given everyone a chance.
Instead of abolishing the SAT, Kendi and others should focus on abolishing Admissions. Open admission schools particularly in STEM fields would given everyone a chance.
I'm in favor of weighted lotteries that are weighted to achieve reasonable gender parity, racial diversity, and sensitivity to geographical concerns (the vast majority of college students go to college close to home) and which are based on students submitting a list of say ten or twelve top choices with a guarantee that they will attend one of those on the list.
My husband and I were having a similar conversation recently: let's do a weighted lottery. There seem not to be enough spots in the UC system for all the kids who are qualified to attend. OK, fine -- but if we can't provide enough spots, let's acknowledge that hard reality, and let's find a fairer way of providing access to the spots. A lottery would be a decent way to do it.
After getting rid of the SAT this year, the UCs crowed that they'd had the most "diverse" year ever. So I looked at the available numbers:
Asian kids have lost ground in recent years, but were still admitted in higher numbers than their proportion in the California population. (Some Asian friends with college-age kids are pretty unhappy about the shrinking numbers of spots, and I get it.)
Black kids have inched up but stayed more or less the same, so they are still underrepresented, at about 2/3 of what it "should be" if we created a freshman class based on the racial percentages in the population.
Latino kids gained a good bit of ground in recent years -- great -- such that the representation in each of those groups is roughly 2/3 of what it "should be" if we created a freshman class based on their percentages in the California population.
And white kids continued to lose ground, such that they represent (again, very roughly, because the numbers aren't in front of me right now) about 20% of UC freshmen, whereas about 40% of Californians are white -- so white kids, at about half their numbers in the population, seem to be the least represented of all.
That's what the UCs consider "the most diverse" ever. But the bigger problem is not the exact demographic numbers, but the way the admissions people follow popular trends in deciding who gets these inadequate numbers of spots and who doesn't.
It's certainly not the case that the missing white kids are all little Thurston Howells who aren't attending UCs because they've joined the lacrosse team at Harvard. These underrepresented white kids are the kids of Walmart workers, bank tellers, K-12 teachers, clerical workers -- regular working-class white people whom the left has forgotten about or has assumed are wicked Trump voters, "racists," and "Nazis" -- the white working class has become the group whom every NPR liberal loves to hate.
So yeah. A lottery is a great idea. At least we can spread some of those scarce spots among a truly representative group of qualified students in the state.
I'd even suggest that we bring the SAT back, give it to every California student, and enroll them all in the UC lottery. (No one's forced to accept a spot or go to college -- but give every qualified kid a shot.) There are plenty of working-class kids of all races who don't realize how smart they are, or who feel "college is not for them" for any number of reasons, such as... kids might not understand the types of aid available, or maybe their parents didn't attend college so they don't know how to go about it.
If these are our public universities, let's try to make them available to the kids who might benefit from them in the fairest way possible. The SAT could be one of many useful tools to make that happen.
The bureaucrats are caught between the Professors on one side, the PR people on the other side, and fundraising people on the other other side; I don't envy them. And for PR purposes Diversity Equity & Inclusion is more about appearances than real representation.
Also, I wonder if the white under-representation might be due to the admissions office thinking "this student is from Atherton/Menlo Park/Cupertino and went to private school, let him go to Stanford or Claremont or Yale or wherever and we'll give that spot to the regular public school kid from Fremont/Salinas/Redding"
I used to tutor SATs and I have very mixed feelings about it. I tried to be an equalizer to some degree by charging sliding scale, so struggling families got my $40/hr rate while the rich ones got the $75/hr rate. But still some students aren't good test takers, so I'm glad most schools now allow supplemental material like a short story they wrote, or a video of a Shakespeare soliloquy or a Cello solo.
But yes I think if a lottery was adequately explained & fully transparent it could work. Or better yet, build a new campus in Chico or Redding.
Maybe Chico AND Redding. And Fresno while they’re at it. Adding UC Merced was wonderful— and wow, they offer so many personalized services for the kids. They seem to focus on first-generation college students and give a lot of direct support and encouragement. But one additional UC campus just wasn’t enough to meet the need.
It’s great that you offered less expensive fees. I understand the mixed feelings. I’m acquainted with people at work who hired $200/hour college admissions “experts” to get their kids into school and it just seemed… well, understandable to want to help your kid in any way possible, but also wrong.
I do my bit by helping any kids who want one-on-one help with their college essays— it’s amazing how much you can teach a kid who’s motivated to learn (y’know, when there is something at stake; not just a school assignment). It feels great to help kids get into school, especially kids who maybe lacked some confidence or didn’t know how the process worked, and to teach ‘em something that will be useful to them.
If you have a very demanding academic program and you make admissions open, you are inevitably going to be flunking a lot of those kids out after a semester or two, because (for example) if you can't get calculus down pretty well, you just can't become a physicist.
This wouldn't be so bad if college didn't also cost a shitton of money from the students imo. Not to flaunt my European privilege, but plenty of people switched majors (sort of, it works way different where I'm studying, but the idea is more important to convey) or even universities after realizing it wasn't for them in the first semester and it wasn't at a particularly high cost. Pandemic notwithstanding, they're doing pretty fine currently.
Confession: I haven't yet read your book, so you may have already addressed this, but I'm stymied by how we can encourage both academic achievement and other forms of achievement as equally valid and valuable in the current educational system.
How do we administer tests to sort students, which I don't necessarily think is useless, without damaging the self-worth of students who do poorly, or even just not as well, as the highest achieving test takers?
I guess that's one of those "liberal" values that are panned. But isn't a positive view of self and what one can contribute a key ingredient in achievement? So how can we shift our education model to be able to identify the academically gifted students and set them on their path while offering equal enthusiasm and dignity to students who would do better and be more fulfilled on a path that doesn't include calculus?
My brother and I are great examples of differing skills. School came easily to me; it didn't for him. Part of it was simply down to interests. He has great interpersonal skills, he was a fantastic after-school-care giver to elementary kids, he was a skilled athlete, and he's great at his current job doing tech support exactly because he doesn't talk to people like they're idiots. That's valuable. But he wasn't taught that his skills were valuable in school in a meaningful way, because school only offers The One Way.
"How do we administer tests to sort students, which I don't necessarily think is useless, without damaging the self-worth of students who do poorly, or even just not as well, as the highest achieving test takers?"
I'd say there's two main ways ways.
1. Get kids excited about math & science *way* earlier. Fix how public schools in tough neighborhoods teach these subjects. (And increase the size & budgets of these specialized schools so more kids who are at least close on the tests can give it a try.)
2. Increase the arts and other fields in both early education AND high school and beyond. So if kids give the hard stuff a try but they find they don't wanna' be research scientists they can take what they have learned and apply to other fields.
"How do we administer tests to sort students, which I don't necessarily think is useless, without damaging the self-worth of students who do poorly, or even just not as well, as the highest achieving test takers?"
I don't think we can. At least not via education policy/schooling. Creating a culture where that's the case is possibly doable (though the attempts I've seen fall into more the 'I'm not good at math' camp than anything I'd view as positive), but not via school.
Once again we arrive at changing hearts and minds. Only this time the hearts and minds belong to the highly educated liberals (such as myself): it’s easier to point at the achievement gap and name it as the problem than to redefine achievement, when doing so would necessarily deflate the value of our own achievements. Which is something Freddie has talked about often. In order for equity to happen, *somebody* is going to have to lose *something* to tip the scales to fairness. A sense of superiority based on education is probably one of those things that needs to be tossed overboard.
A place to start might be a living minimum wage (I’m all for a universal basic income, but that’s a harder political sell). A living wage is literally giving value to the kinds of hard work that don’t require mastery of the five paragraph essay or advanced algebra, but have lately proven to be essential.
Seems like an awfully big assumption that gifted and talented kids will be fine "no matter what." Cohorts matter, boredom can have serious consequences, and it's not as if there's data on the kids who could have but didn't get into programs. And after all we're talking about the tails of the ability distribution here, it's in society's best interest to make sure those people are found and supported. The assumption almost seems to directly oppose the rest of your post - if individuals have varying natural abilities, AND environment matters, then doesn't it make sense to find the people with greater abilities and improve their environment?
Casual reader here. I have no idea how much or how little this debate is settled and if there is or isnt consensus on this particular question (kids will do fine no matter what). But if you want to listen to a podcast that talks about this question with some detail, the Sam Harris episodes with Robert Plomin talked about this question and Plomin seems convinced the evidence is solid.
I'm mad at the fact that my children's school includes a class on getting better scores on the ACT.
How messed up are one's incentives that a public school has to offer tutoring on a standardized test (as opposed to, say, a statistics class or a literature class or literally ANYTHING else)? What possible, possible social good is that going to further?
But how deranged is that? "We've turned this standardized test into a meritocratic exercise. But at the same time, rich people will game this test, so we are going to spend money that people put in to help society as a whole towards helping you compete with other people."
We are spending tax money to compete with ourselves. I can't imagine much greater waste.
This post is right on point. I have worked in the entertainment and restaurant publishing industry for the past 40 years and what makes those industries tick are people with exceptional talent. And not only on the creator side. It takes exceptional talent and a lot of practice to determine what is going to be a successful recording or to taste the food of the chef that has the best chance to make an important contribution to the craft. What I find surprising about the current trend in universities that you describe, is that only people who do not have real life experience of investing their own money in a business could believe that exceptional talent doesn't exist. But I assure you that if you could force Ibram X Kendi to use his own money to try and pick hit rap records, his worldview will change pretty quickly.
But your article also makes me wonder about the following that is a bit difficult to articulate. There was a time when having an Ivy League education was a rarified experience. In fact there was a time when simply having a college degree was rarified. No longer. A college degree is so common, and so many people have degrees from top universities, including advanced degrees, that their value has been diminished. And I am wondering if we need to create a more rarified educational experience for the exceptionally talented than the ones we can offer today. How that manifests itself is above my pay grade. Because as you say, it is the employers who want the educational system to do sorting of students to make it easy for them to identify potential candidates. But maybe the time has come for Microsoft & Google etc. to get into that business.
"an attempt to shut down those structures that make educational inequality visible" - partly to avoid uncomfortable conversations as you say, but also middle-class self interest: "Someone Has To Fail" by David Labaree, HUP 2012.
sorry, I wasn't clear enough - I was trying to address the aspirational middle class and its desire to keep inequality invisible so their kids get into "better" (more prestigious) schools. ". . . if eliminating entrance examinations is an effort to improve the standing of Black students, it is necessarily also an effort to hurt the standing of students from certain other races."
Even at schools that don't require SAT/ACT scores, you can still provide that information to make your application look better. And the middle-class students I tutor (not for tests; for regular subjects) are all onboard with continuing the SATs. I'm guessing the SJW left amount to a grand total of 100,000 people nationwide. Loud but ineffectual, except as right-wing punching bags.
I completely disagree that the aspirational middle class has (overall) a "desire to keep inequality invisible". My experience, as a member of this class, is that they would like the system to be "fair", which means clear rules that do not discriminate on the basis of race. Then, within those rules, they want to help their kids succeed as much as possible. To make a sports analogy, they don't want to blatantly cheat, but they want to scream at the refs.
And the SJW left is far more powerful than their numbers indicate. Ask Don McNeil.
As someone making hiring decisions, if I see someone who got perfect grades at a noncompetitive regional state school, I consider that person as impressive as someone who got good-but-not-perfect grades at a highly selective school. Grades are a way for those who went to North Dakota State to be able to compete with those who went to Duke. Ending assessment may flatten the range of outcomes within an institution (though I'm skeptical of that), but it will certainly exacerbate the range of outcomes between institutions.
This was a great read. Unfortunately, it seems very rare to address counter arguments in good faith as is done here.
I would propose one addition to #3: SES correlates with academic performance and parental academic performance is also correlated with household SES. There's so much noise here, but I would suggest three things are going on here among the elite: an advantage in material resources, likely a stronger culture of valuing education and some hereditary inheritance of ability. The last point (hereditary inheritance) seems the hardest to talk about (I can feel the thunderclouds forming over my head). It also suggests that there will be some limit in generational economic mobility, i.e. the economic quintile you were born into will almost always be correlated with where you wind up no matter how much redistribution you have.
Well, Sam Harris has spoken eloquently about the fact that we as a society don't have to attach education and wealth as closely as we do. Yes, some people are genetically pre-disposed to science & math. They should be the ones making medicines and inventing shit. Not people who don't know how to engineer stuff. But they don't have to be paid more than everyone else. (There's an argument that they're underpaid to begin with.) Obviously the bigger point is that if you get into Yale you have options. If you don't then you have less options. And less chances of getting out of poverty if you were born into it.
It's complicated. But education should be to educated. It shouldn't be a factory for social and monetary success only.
No argument from me on any of this. Completely agree that the fact that we have an elite class that considers the rest of us to be peons is a much bigger issue than how we pick that elite class.
Excellent article.
Here's my technical case along the same lines for the GRE for physics grad school:
Here's some of my work that bolsters your case, although it concerns GRE's rather than SATs. The common theme is the extraordinary lengths of embarrassing pseudo-scientific foolery to which the anti-test types resort.
Princeton Merton seminar: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHEvLUxTWGsAjNjR3epRiQw
arXiv paper with references to earlier technical publication in Science Advances: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09442
discussion on Andrew Gelman's blog : https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/12/14/debate-involving-a-bad-analysis-of-gre-scores/
My one quibble is that I think you've sort of muddled the description of collider stratification bias. It's distinguished from simple range restriction because unlike simple range restriction the stratification induces a correlation between the suspected cause and the other variables with which it collides on the stratified variable. If those other variables are outside the model, that typically induces a negative bias in the coefficient estimate.
"you've sort of muddled the description of collider stratification bias. It's distinguished from simple range restriction"
If so, that's indeed a problem. I think (?) I tried to separate two things - the range restriction problem inherent to entrance exam research in general, and the specific failure to account for colliders in the bad ACT UChicago paper. But it's always possible I screwed up the stats....
My point is that ACT doesn't "collide" with ACT! That sounds like simple range restriction, which ruins signal/noise in finding coefficients. That can be cured by very large N. It collides with other criteria used in admissions, which produces systematically biased coefficient estimates regardless of signal/noise. That can't be cured by large N.
Ugh, thanks. I knew I should have kept it simple.... I had a bit about Berkson's paradox in there too but I took it out for length considerations. Probably for the best.
Easily fixable, no big deal.
At about minute 42 in this I have a discussion of collider stratification bas in this context. You might enjoy it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upZdvOzyG4A&t=1243s
Nice, thanks.
I think people would be less wary to talk about inherent differences if so many people didn't use them as an excuse to further marginalize minorities. For example, I've seen people argue that it's perfectly reasonable to defund schools in poor neighborhoods because students there have lower academic achievements. Now, I'm not saying you or anyone else who agrees with your point is necessarily in this camp, but it seems unfair to go on about how stupid liberals are being without acknowledging there just might be an actual reason for their attitude. I don't even think the liberals are right about this and frankly, I think the whole education system is broken, I also don't think factors like that should be omitted.
This is a very minor point so I won't go too in depth but as someone currently studying in a STEM field, I can tell you it really does change how you view the world even of it's not what it aims to do. Maybe the CA DoE's incentives are weird but I see teaching math and science as being less about regurgitating facts and applying formulas and more about exploration to be a good thing. It's way closer to what actual scientists do and I belive it does more to encourage students' interest in those fields (I mean, those who aren't already passionate about differential math at age 12 :P). I for sure wasn't as passionate about it until I started my study and realized how interesting it actually is when it's less about memorization.
I don't think you're actually wrong about what the best approach to schooling is, but some arguments you make just bother me and I don't think they really support your cause.
You seem to think Freddie is saying that kids who fail the SAT’s shouldn’t be taught science or math at all. I feel he’s saying the opposite. If kids who don’t have the capacity for a certain level of math or science, but are then admitted into Stuyvesant high school or maybe MIT later, they’re gonna’ fail. They won’t be able to grasp the magic of science.
Now do we need to teach that magic earlier? Yes. But that involves cultural stuff too. If we agree that it’s not genetic in any real way, (which is my take too) then something else is making it so these kids, Black & Latino disproportionately, aren’t getting excited by math and science early enough. Why? I don’t know.
That’s what has to be fixed. Not the tests.
Honestly, my point about STEM stuff was more born out of personal annoyance with the "to teach math as if it is as subjective as literature or art" line because people not in those sorts of fields talking about science as if it's static and about scientists as if they were human fact dispensers peeves me immensely. I actually had that in the comment originally but it got lost in translation, so to speak, when I went back and reworked it because I came off as elitist.
What I was trying to say is that CA's approach didn't seem so bad from the perspective of someone with a bit more advanced knowledge of mathematics. Based on skimming (because I'm not about to read a hundred page government document for an internet argument about something I'm not quite so invested in) it seems that they want to encourage analytical thinking through mathematics.
As for why Black and Latino children might not be so excited by it, maybe being told all their life they're genetically predisposed to be a rube who doesn't grasp science (to put it nicely) kinda crushes that excitement. That's definitely my take on that particular issue.
One last thing: I don't really see how one could hold the opinion that people who fail the SATs shouldn't be taught math or science, because, unless I'm mistaken about which grade we're talking about here, the teaching happens BEFORE the SATs and we haven't invented time machines yet ;p
Hey. Thanks for the response. I hear you about how they teach math. I actually think I have an aptitude for math, but I grew up in the "learn your times tables" era. So I totally lost interest. Whereas my kid, 15 now, grew up with math manipulatives and much more progressive and even "fun" ways of learning math & science. So again, I'm all for that.
That said, again, I don't think Freddie meant math should just be clinical. He's responding more the post modernist take with all the 2+2=5 stuff. (It's a thing.)
Of course that's fringe and people just arguing to argue. But on the point about kids of color falling behind I bet we're 100% in agreement. The fact that they're falling behind is clearly due to legacy of racism and Jim Crow. But that doesn't mean the tests are "racist". The tests here in NYC high schools is for ADVANCED kids. High school and then prep for college. Of course the kids who pass those tests should still be taught science and math. It's just that the odds of becoming a programer or statistical analyst or whatever, become slimmer if you don't grasp it early.
I think we agree more than we realize. To recap: lower schools need to improve *how* they teach math to underpriviliged kids. (It's not just budgets). Agreed?
But as a STEM student yourself you must understand that there are soooo many variables. Educational, cultural, financial, societal and yes even genetics. Which is the point of Freddie's article.
I'll end with this. Here in NY there was an uproar about only 8 black or latino kids getting into Styvesant, (the premiere STEM High School here) getting in when there were hundreds of slots. Look, even if you believed everything people like Charles Murray says about genetics (which I DO NOT for the record), that wouldn't explain such a discrepancy. So what *is* the problem? Is the test racist? That's what AOC (who I actually like even though I disagree with her here) and many other progressives believe. But the evidence says otherwise.
I believe it has to start earlier. Otherwise MIT will just take more kids from privates schools or even other countries. If the tests need to be fixed then fix them. But I'd bet good money that you'd have to do a lot more.
Thoughts?
Kids who pass OR FAIL those tests still need math & sciences, is what I meant to say. But there's a difference between truly gifted kids by high school and kids who didn't quite grasp the more complicated stuff. You can't teach all the kids the same stuff after a certain point. The kids who are more creative and less linear wouldn't want that either. (I know I wouldn't). Teach math & science and logic all through school. But don't pretend everyone can be an expert mathematician. It's a fantasy.
"He's responding more the post modernist take with all the 2+2=5 stuff. (It's a thing.)" Ohhhh, I'm not sure we're going to get along. I know what you're referencing and we had very different takeaways. Also, he linked to a specific article about a specific education policy in California and not what you're referencing, which is afaik a twitter thread by some math guy. Ergo, I think it's reasonable to interpret as him talking about that and similar policy decisions, especially considering this whole discourse is about what schools should do, i. e. what policy they should implement. I know this is probably way too pedantic but this is what you get when you talk to people like me (trust me, I hate it too).
And yeah, there's definitely various factors, I just think in this particular context it's important to emphasize the very fact that people will dismiss certain demographics on the basis of race and then justify it with "oh well, I'm just saying there are genetic factors!" affects the outcome. Personally, I think family is another big factor, since that's where children first see role models and most of the time parents have a certain life path they want their kids to take. I don't really know what the common Black or Latino family experience is, but other cultures commonly push their children to be doctors for example, and a lot of people from those cultures do follow that path.
I understood the point of Freddie's article to be "these common arguments against the SATs are wrong, genetics to affect things and there are problems with the whole system that people within it just sort of ignore". That's super condensed but it's what I got. I don't think he's saying ONLY genetics affect the outcome but he is saying that when controlled for other factors, inborn abilities still win out.
Those are pretty much my thoughts. I don't really know what AOC has said, I've only seen people online argue about the myths Freddie addressed in the beginning, and I'm not familiar with the incident you're talking about so I can't speak on it. It could be racist, I don't know! It's being taken in a society where racism is still an issue and current generations are being affected by past injustices as well, so it really should be less about the specific test and more what it says about the society.
I’m a bit confused. Do YOU agree that intellectual ability is at lease partly inheritable? Or are you saying that’s a smokescreen for people who want to retain the status quo?
I don't have enough information to form an opinion either way tbh. But I do think it's a smokescreen and that people need to acknowledge that.
I think it is almost inevitable that someone somewhere will pick up on anything you say and use it to argue for some bad idea. But I still think we're a lot better off speaking the truth about things like differences in intellectual ability than about telling socially-desirable lies about it.
Definitely, but when so many people misuse an argument, I think it should be addressed. It's kind of like how feminists spent half a decade denying there was any amount of hatred against men in the movement (despite it being present since at least the 2nd wave), the next half of said decade insisting misandrists had nothing to do with them while never actually providing any counterarguments, and they're starting the current decade with "wait guys stop hating men so much, it's getting ridiculous". There could have been a push against the nonsense a long time ago but there wasn't, and if there isn't a push by anti-racists who nonetheless believe genetics are a factor in education, then the same thing is going to happen.
Thinking about it more, I think what I really want is to finally see that essay about race science. The People need it!! Also, on Montessori schools but that's just because I'm curious what people think about them.
Race science is bullshit because race as we know it is a total construct. Genetic differences are real. Racial differences are not. Can we agree on that at least?
Well, yeah, but if you try to tell that to anyone who isn't already caught up to modern race discourse and they'll either look at you like you're a clown or subtweet you with a tweet about how SJWs think there's 0 difference between white people and black people. I really just want to ste- I mean, read and perhaps borrow some arguments that are likely to work against people like that.
It's not that there's no difference between "white & black" people. It's that there's no such thing as "white" or "black" people. There's differences between people. Period. The science is pretty clear on that.
Who do you want to steal arguments from? I only want the argument that's true.
I like this post. I can't say for sure, and you touch briefly on meritocracy in the post, but I sometimes wonder if the resistance to the SAT and GRE is partly because of academia's view of itself as a meritocracy is something like a fundamental belief. As you know, it is not and has probably never been a meritocracy, but when discussed the lack of "true" meritocracy is usually stated as due to external factors preventing it (student wealth, parental connections, bureaucratic reasons, etc.) and only very rarely as due to anything academia itself is doing wrong. To see the SAT and GRE as having validity means that increasing diversity implies lower-ability students are intentionally being admitted over higher-ability students, which poses an existential question to academia even though, as you exactly stated, an academic ability gap does not imply an academic potential gap. Unfortunately, there's not really anything academia can do to erase all the sociocultural bullshit that kids have gone through their past 17+ years driving the ability gap. Which is all just to say, that academia wants to admit a more racially diverse student body (which is a good thing!) but the test results showing an ability gap, if valid, clash with their fundamental self-perception as a meritocracy, hence the tests showing must be invalid in order to preserve the self-perception of meritocracy.
Of course, I'm speculating about the beliefs of wide swaths of people which is always wrong, because the swaths don't believe things, people do.
The other self-perception issue is that few people in academia want to admit that they work in a giant sorting machine for the private sector. If more people came to terms with that, they'd probably be more concerned about making the machine they work for worse at sorting. But if you really just don't believe it, you're not going to be as concerned.
Right - they would like to maintain their illusion that they are fighting the capitalist system when in fact they are (I was) a key cog in that system.
I used to occasionally tell my students that I was sorting them for industry. They got mad. It's not just the teachers who don't want to believe it.
I think if you admit to yourself that college is primarily a large financial investment you're making for career reasons, it becomes harder to justify majoring in English, which maybe you kinda just want to do regardless? So even for the students it becomes a weird milkshake of 'life experience' / 'I love learning' / 'also this is my ticket into the middle class'.
But yeah I think there's a lot of cognitive dissonance across the board on this subject - the college entrance debate itself is nonsensical you don't start with the assumption that we're trying to redistribute a small supply of economically valuable signals for the private sector. The SAT is only relevant to a small subset of selective colleges. The SAT isn't preventing people from getting into *a* college in America...
Specifically, academia functions as an IQ-testing proxy for the benefit of a private sector that is no longer allowed to administer IQ tests to applicants--though that doesn't change the private sector's pressing need for information about the IQ of applicants. Everyone loves to hate on IQ, but it matters. It's not everything; no particular quality is everything. Honesty, perseverance, empathy, all kinds of things will matter in the workplace, but it makes as little sense to pretend that an honest employee will do great even if he completely lacks horsepower as it does to pretend that a genius is going to work out great even though he's a thieving sociopath. Lying isn't going to get us to the political promised land here.
The concept of "academia" as a monolith really has to be broken into at least two pieces, STEM and non-STEM. In STEM academia (where I have 38 years of experience), I claim that absolutely everyone knows that there is a range of inherent ability, that it correlates moderately well with standardized test results (though these are much less useful at the extremes, and there are plenty of exceptions: gifted students who test poorly), and that we are engaged in sorting as a primary function.
Oh, and the vast majority of us have no interest in "fighting the capitalist system", having plenty of interaction with colleagues who are in (or have fled from) communist or socialist systems.
Are there really academic areas where the people working in them don't notice that some people are smarter than others? This seems like the sort of thing that it would take a lot of mental effort not to understand in almost any academic setting.
My view on gifted and talented programs is that they don’t teach smart kids math or writing or whatever but instead they teach effort. I can only speak for myself but I basically sleep-walked through K-12 and undergrad and my masters program. I briefly went off to a masters at UChicago and just did horribly because it was actually vaguely hard and I had basically never put in effort academically at any point in my life. Gifted and talented programs in theory could help kids like that put in effort by forcing them to from a young age instead of coasting to success. This matters because a lack of effort certainly limits your high-end educational and professional out outcomes.
I was pretty bored (and extremely frustrated) thru K-12, and most of college, but I imagine I would have felt even worse had I not also been in the 'gifted' classes.
I was very lucky in that my pre-college school allowed (tho VERY grudgingly) me to go 'beyond' just 'gifted' classes, but it's still (somewhat) amazing that 'educators' would erect ANY obstacles to any student's academic efforts. What's the point of schooling if not that? (Somewhat obviously, that's NOT really the point.)
I attended some accelerated classes in public high school. I'm sure it was helpful to be challenged, so that I learned before I got to college what it meant to have to stretch a bit. Equally important, though, was discovering that classes could be interesting and paced suitably for a student like me, and therefore a lifelong source of intense pleasure and meaning.
It makes no sense to pretend that all students need information delivered to them at the same rate. It's odd how easily we accept the notion that some universities and curricula are dramatically more difficult than others, while blanching at the thought of the same disparities in public high school classes. What's the magic that occurs at age 18?
Thank goodness it will always be difficult to eliminate the role of families in encouraging self-directed learning, or for that matter to prevent young people from becoming confident autodidacts with or without family support. Thank goodness also for internet learning tools, which may be all that will save academically gifted students when the public school system completes its degeneration into madness.
One major thing that I think gets ignored by pretending that some students don't have more ability than others is the damage it does to students and their upward mobility.
Letting a student in who is bright but not overwhelmingly above average into a very rigorous school is a great way to increase their chances of dropping out of college dramatically while at the same time possibly strapping them with student loan debt. The same student may have done very well at a less rigorous school and completed their degree.
The goal of whistling past the graveyard w/r/t to the SAT's ability to predict student success seems to be to create more diverse student bodies with the apparent end goal of improving the outcomes of minority students, but it will almost certainly end up doing the reverse in many cases.
This was one of Malcolm gladwell’s point in David and Goliath. He had a chapter on a student choosing an ivy vs a state school and argued the state school would’ve been better. Better to be a big fish/little pond than little fish/big pond. Idk - have seen the opposite argued as well : that ivies offer connections , contacts and opportunity.
I had a black, presumably low-income classmate in college that was Valedictorian or Salutatorian at his high school with a huge dropout rate. I was nervous working with him because I certainly wasn't in the top 10% of my class (low GPA, but very high SAT and AP scores). It wasn't until I started actually working with him on assignments that I realized how far behind he was in terms of reading and writing and he really struggled in the class. It dawned on me that a 4.0 at one school is not a 4.0 at another school. Not saying he was dumb, just that his school probably had different standards considering the student-body.
So even if they drop the SAT to try to increase the diversity of the student body, my anecdotal experience has shown me that many of them are already so far behind that even if they do get in they're still going to struggle. Sure, some will overcome it, but the learning gap starts at an early age and removing the SAT isn't going to fix that.
"And throwing money at our educational problems, while noble in intent, hasn’t worked. (People react violently to this, but for example poorer and Blacker public schools receive significantly higher per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools, which should not be a surprise given that the policy apparatus has been shoveling money at the racial performance gap for 40 years.)"
I appreciated this piece but I have mixed views on this point: I don't disagree that the studies show what they show in terms of the marginal dollar but in my view to really move the needle you'd need to spend a good deal more money. In Massachusetts, where I live, urban schools that serve Black students are much better funded than in years past, but they still have (i) decrepit physical plants, (ii) no really comprehensive afterschool or summer programming, (iii) school breakfast and lunch programs that are slightly better than prison food, etc. Those things could be fixed, and they should be, but that would cost thousands of dollars per student per year and those investments have not yet been made.
This is a very good point. Do the per-pupil funding stats include facility construction and repair? My guess is that's considered a different budget item. Even if not, the starting point of the physical plant in poor areas is undoubtedly much worse, and so there needs to be a ton of spending to get to even. Then we can start counting dollars per pupil.
Instead of abolishing the SAT, Kendi and others should focus on abolishing Admissions. Open admission schools particularly in STEM fields would given everyone a chance.
Not at the higher levels. If you didn’t get Calc in high school, you ain’t gonna understand an MIT math class. Ever. It’s just too damn late.
Wanna get more kids into science & math early? Then I’m with you. It’s gotta start early. School AND home.
Instead of abolishing the SAT, Kendi and others should focus on abolishing Admissions. Open admission schools particularly in STEM fields would given everyone a chance.
I'm in favor of weighted lotteries that are weighted to achieve reasonable gender parity, racial diversity, and sensitivity to geographical concerns (the vast majority of college students go to college close to home) and which are based on students submitting a list of say ten or twelve top choices with a guarantee that they will attend one of those on the list.
that's how matching is done for medical residents
My husband and I were having a similar conversation recently: let's do a weighted lottery. There seem not to be enough spots in the UC system for all the kids who are qualified to attend. OK, fine -- but if we can't provide enough spots, let's acknowledge that hard reality, and let's find a fairer way of providing access to the spots. A lottery would be a decent way to do it.
After getting rid of the SAT this year, the UCs crowed that they'd had the most "diverse" year ever. So I looked at the available numbers:
Asian kids have lost ground in recent years, but were still admitted in higher numbers than their proportion in the California population. (Some Asian friends with college-age kids are pretty unhappy about the shrinking numbers of spots, and I get it.)
Black kids have inched up but stayed more or less the same, so they are still underrepresented, at about 2/3 of what it "should be" if we created a freshman class based on the racial percentages in the population.
Latino kids gained a good bit of ground in recent years -- great -- such that the representation in each of those groups is roughly 2/3 of what it "should be" if we created a freshman class based on their percentages in the California population.
And white kids continued to lose ground, such that they represent (again, very roughly, because the numbers aren't in front of me right now) about 20% of UC freshmen, whereas about 40% of Californians are white -- so white kids, at about half their numbers in the population, seem to be the least represented of all.
That's what the UCs consider "the most diverse" ever. But the bigger problem is not the exact demographic numbers, but the way the admissions people follow popular trends in deciding who gets these inadequate numbers of spots and who doesn't.
It's certainly not the case that the missing white kids are all little Thurston Howells who aren't attending UCs because they've joined the lacrosse team at Harvard. These underrepresented white kids are the kids of Walmart workers, bank tellers, K-12 teachers, clerical workers -- regular working-class white people whom the left has forgotten about or has assumed are wicked Trump voters, "racists," and "Nazis" -- the white working class has become the group whom every NPR liberal loves to hate.
So yeah. A lottery is a great idea. At least we can spread some of those scarce spots among a truly representative group of qualified students in the state.
I'd even suggest that we bring the SAT back, give it to every California student, and enroll them all in the UC lottery. (No one's forced to accept a spot or go to college -- but give every qualified kid a shot.) There are plenty of working-class kids of all races who don't realize how smart they are, or who feel "college is not for them" for any number of reasons, such as... kids might not understand the types of aid available, or maybe their parents didn't attend college so they don't know how to go about it.
If these are our public universities, let's try to make them available to the kids who might benefit from them in the fairest way possible. The SAT could be one of many useful tools to make that happen.
The bureaucrats are caught between the Professors on one side, the PR people on the other side, and fundraising people on the other other side; I don't envy them. And for PR purposes Diversity Equity & Inclusion is more about appearances than real representation.
Also, I wonder if the white under-representation might be due to the admissions office thinking "this student is from Atherton/Menlo Park/Cupertino and went to private school, let him go to Stanford or Claremont or Yale or wherever and we'll give that spot to the regular public school kid from Fremont/Salinas/Redding"
I used to tutor SATs and I have very mixed feelings about it. I tried to be an equalizer to some degree by charging sliding scale, so struggling families got my $40/hr rate while the rich ones got the $75/hr rate. But still some students aren't good test takers, so I'm glad most schools now allow supplemental material like a short story they wrote, or a video of a Shakespeare soliloquy or a Cello solo.
But yes I think if a lottery was adequately explained & fully transparent it could work. Or better yet, build a new campus in Chico or Redding.
Maybe Chico AND Redding. And Fresno while they’re at it. Adding UC Merced was wonderful— and wow, they offer so many personalized services for the kids. They seem to focus on first-generation college students and give a lot of direct support and encouragement. But one additional UC campus just wasn’t enough to meet the need.
It’s great that you offered less expensive fees. I understand the mixed feelings. I’m acquainted with people at work who hired $200/hour college admissions “experts” to get their kids into school and it just seemed… well, understandable to want to help your kid in any way possible, but also wrong.
I do my bit by helping any kids who want one-on-one help with their college essays— it’s amazing how much you can teach a kid who’s motivated to learn (y’know, when there is something at stake; not just a school assignment). It feels great to help kids get into school, especially kids who maybe lacked some confidence or didn’t know how the process worked, and to teach ‘em something that will be useful to them.
CCNY did that years ago. Disaster.
If you have a very demanding academic program and you make admissions open, you are inevitably going to be flunking a lot of those kids out after a semester or two, because (for example) if you can't get calculus down pretty well, you just can't become a physicist.
This wouldn't be so bad if college didn't also cost a shitton of money from the students imo. Not to flaunt my European privilege, but plenty of people switched majors (sort of, it works way different where I'm studying, but the idea is more important to convey) or even universities after realizing it wasn't for them in the first semester and it wasn't at a particularly high cost. Pandemic notwithstanding, they're doing pretty fine currently.
Confession: I haven't yet read your book, so you may have already addressed this, but I'm stymied by how we can encourage both academic achievement and other forms of achievement as equally valid and valuable in the current educational system.
How do we administer tests to sort students, which I don't necessarily think is useless, without damaging the self-worth of students who do poorly, or even just not as well, as the highest achieving test takers?
I guess that's one of those "liberal" values that are panned. But isn't a positive view of self and what one can contribute a key ingredient in achievement? So how can we shift our education model to be able to identify the academically gifted students and set them on their path while offering equal enthusiasm and dignity to students who would do better and be more fulfilled on a path that doesn't include calculus?
My brother and I are great examples of differing skills. School came easily to me; it didn't for him. Part of it was simply down to interests. He has great interpersonal skills, he was a fantastic after-school-care giver to elementary kids, he was a skilled athlete, and he's great at his current job doing tech support exactly because he doesn't talk to people like they're idiots. That's valuable. But he wasn't taught that his skills were valuable in school in a meaningful way, because school only offers The One Way.
"How do we administer tests to sort students, which I don't necessarily think is useless, without damaging the self-worth of students who do poorly, or even just not as well, as the highest achieving test takers?"
I'd say there's two main ways ways.
1. Get kids excited about math & science *way* earlier. Fix how public schools in tough neighborhoods teach these subjects. (And increase the size & budgets of these specialized schools so more kids who are at least close on the tests can give it a try.)
2. Increase the arts and other fields in both early education AND high school and beyond. So if kids give the hard stuff a try but they find they don't wanna' be research scientists they can take what they have learned and apply to other fields.
Options. Kids need more options.
"How do we administer tests to sort students, which I don't necessarily think is useless, without damaging the self-worth of students who do poorly, or even just not as well, as the highest achieving test takers?"
I don't think we can. At least not via education policy/schooling. Creating a culture where that's the case is possibly doable (though the attempts I've seen fall into more the 'I'm not good at math' camp than anything I'd view as positive), but not via school.
Once again we arrive at changing hearts and minds. Only this time the hearts and minds belong to the highly educated liberals (such as myself): it’s easier to point at the achievement gap and name it as the problem than to redefine achievement, when doing so would necessarily deflate the value of our own achievements. Which is something Freddie has talked about often. In order for equity to happen, *somebody* is going to have to lose *something* to tip the scales to fairness. A sense of superiority based on education is probably one of those things that needs to be tossed overboard.
A place to start might be a living minimum wage (I’m all for a universal basic income, but that’s a harder political sell). A living wage is literally giving value to the kinds of hard work that don’t require mastery of the five paragraph essay or advanced algebra, but have lately proven to be essential.
Seems like an awfully big assumption that gifted and talented kids will be fine "no matter what." Cohorts matter, boredom can have serious consequences, and it's not as if there's data on the kids who could have but didn't get into programs. And after all we're talking about the tails of the ability distribution here, it's in society's best interest to make sure those people are found and supported. The assumption almost seems to directly oppose the rest of your post - if individuals have varying natural abilities, AND environment matters, then doesn't it make sense to find the people with greater abilities and improve their environment?
Casual reader here. I have no idea how much or how little this debate is settled and if there is or isnt consensus on this particular question (kids will do fine no matter what). But if you want to listen to a podcast that talks about this question with some detail, the Sam Harris episodes with Robert Plomin talked about this question and Plomin seems convinced the evidence is solid.
I'm mad at the fact that my children's school includes a class on getting better scores on the ACT.
How messed up are one's incentives that a public school has to offer tutoring on a standardized test (as opposed to, say, a statistics class or a literature class or literally ANYTHING else)? What possible, possible social good is that going to further?
It might find gifted kids who will go on to cure the next pandemic. Or climate change. Or cancer.
The ACT?? In what world would a PREPARATION CLASS for the ACT assist with that?
it's going to shut the ambitious parents up, thereby reducing teacher alcoholism. /sarc
It's a compromise to level the playing field between kids who have the opportunity to get tutoring outside of school and those who don't.
Yes. And if I may say so: obviously.
But how deranged is that? "We've turned this standardized test into a meritocratic exercise. But at the same time, rich people will game this test, so we are going to spend money that people put in to help society as a whole towards helping you compete with other people."
We are spending tax money to compete with ourselves. I can't imagine much greater waste.
This post is right on point. I have worked in the entertainment and restaurant publishing industry for the past 40 years and what makes those industries tick are people with exceptional talent. And not only on the creator side. It takes exceptional talent and a lot of practice to determine what is going to be a successful recording or to taste the food of the chef that has the best chance to make an important contribution to the craft. What I find surprising about the current trend in universities that you describe, is that only people who do not have real life experience of investing their own money in a business could believe that exceptional talent doesn't exist. But I assure you that if you could force Ibram X Kendi to use his own money to try and pick hit rap records, his worldview will change pretty quickly.
But your article also makes me wonder about the following that is a bit difficult to articulate. There was a time when having an Ivy League education was a rarified experience. In fact there was a time when simply having a college degree was rarified. No longer. A college degree is so common, and so many people have degrees from top universities, including advanced degrees, that their value has been diminished. And I am wondering if we need to create a more rarified educational experience for the exceptionally talented than the ones we can offer today. How that manifests itself is above my pay grade. Because as you say, it is the employers who want the educational system to do sorting of students to make it easy for them to identify potential candidates. But maybe the time has come for Microsoft & Google etc. to get into that business.
Excellent piece! I was lucky to have never taken the SATs myself (HS dropout, but I ended up doing the GED and then an Associate's and finally a BSCS.
"an attempt to shut down those structures that make educational inequality visible" - partly to avoid uncomfortable conversations as you say, but also middle-class self interest: "Someone Has To Fail" by David Labaree, HUP 2012.
But it's not the middle class that wants to abolish the SAT, it's the SJW left.
sorry, I wasn't clear enough - I was trying to address the aspirational middle class and its desire to keep inequality invisible so their kids get into "better" (more prestigious) schools. ". . . if eliminating entrance examinations is an effort to improve the standing of Black students, it is necessarily also an effort to hurt the standing of students from certain other races."
Even at schools that don't require SAT/ACT scores, you can still provide that information to make your application look better. And the middle-class students I tutor (not for tests; for regular subjects) are all onboard with continuing the SATs. I'm guessing the SJW left amount to a grand total of 100,000 people nationwide. Loud but ineffectual, except as right-wing punching bags.
I completely disagree that the aspirational middle class has (overall) a "desire to keep inequality invisible". My experience, as a member of this class, is that they would like the system to be "fair", which means clear rules that do not discriminate on the basis of race. Then, within those rules, they want to help their kids succeed as much as possible. To make a sports analogy, they don't want to blatantly cheat, but they want to scream at the refs.
And the SJW left is far more powerful than their numbers indicate. Ask Don McNeil.
What is “aspirational middle class”? I’ve not heard that phrase before.
As someone making hiring decisions, if I see someone who got perfect grades at a noncompetitive regional state school, I consider that person as impressive as someone who got good-but-not-perfect grades at a highly selective school. Grades are a way for those who went to North Dakota State to be able to compete with those who went to Duke. Ending assessment may flatten the range of outcomes within an institution (though I'm skeptical of that), but it will certainly exacerbate the range of outcomes between institutions.