For a brief period, colleges and universities suspended the use of standardized tests; now they’re bringing them back in the name of equality. New York Times senior writer David Leonhardt joins host Krys Boyd to discuss using the SAT and ACT to asses students, why grade inflation and test-prep courses make admissions harder for institutions hoping to diversify their student bodies, and why test scores are more indicative of class than ability. His article is “The Misguided War on the SAT.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] It’s an undisputed fact about standardized college entrance exams. The students who tend to get the best scores as a group are those who enjoy racial or economic privilege or both. That’s caused many education advocates to argue that the tests are biased somehow against students who may have great potential but fewer advantages early in life. But here’s a question Do tests like the SAT and Act cause inequities in American education, or do they simply make existing inequities impossible to ignore? From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Elite universities are currently wrestling with these questions. Starting in the pandemic, many changed admissions policies to consider applicants with or without test scores. But some schools, including MIT, have reinstated requirements for those scores, in part because testing proponents say stellar results can help an otherwise disadvantaged student rise to the top in a way that grades alone cannot do. David Leonhardt has been covering this as a senior writer at the New York Times, where you can find his article, “The Misguided War on the SAT.” David, welcome back to Think.
David Leonhardt [00:01:10] It’s good to be back. Thank you.
Krys Boyd [00:01:12] Why did many schools remove the requirement for applicants to submit SAT and AC T scores during the pandemic? Was it strictly that these tests could not be conducted easily and in like a socially distanced way?
David Leonhardt [00:01:25] That wasn’t the only reason. That was certainly part of the reason. And that really accelerated the move away from standardized tests. But we had already seen growing skepticism toward or hostility to standardized tests from a lot of colleges even before the pandemic. And I think there are multiple reasons for that. One who likes standardized tests. I still remember the anxiety from taking the S.A.T. 36 years ago now. And so the tests are easy to hate. And then I think one thing to remember is that colleges and particularly elite colleges and by elite, I’m including both public universities like the University of Texas and the University of Michigan and also private universities like Harvard and Rice and Stanford. These these places are dominated by people on the left, half of the political spectrum. And I think we we’re in a period in the late 2000 teens and early 2020s where the where progressives in this country were questioning a lot of things. They were questioning immigration law. They were questioning policing. They’re questioning drug laws. And one of the things that this newly emboldened progressivism questioned is, are standardized tests any good or are, in fact, they counterproductive? And so it was a mix of this newly emboldened progressivism with the logistical issues that Covid created.
Krys Boyd [00:02:51] So the pandemic in some ways gave some of these people concerned about these tests a cover to experiment with, removing them as a requirement for admission.
David Leonhardt [00:03:01] That’s right. Standardized tests as a requirement briefly almost had to go away in in the spring of 2020 it really wasn’t possible to get students to take it. Now, in relatively short order, it did become possible to take it. But there was a brief time where it was almost impossible, and that really led to a much broader questioning of tests. And nearly all selective colleges moved toward at least a test optional policy in which they said, you can send us your scores if you’ve taken it, but you don’t have to, Which, of course, was a big change from the way it was for decades, where everybody applying to these schools had to take a standardized test like the S.A.T. or the A.C.T..
Krys Boyd [00:03:48] What kinds of patterns have been observed in how students score as a group based on income and background?
David Leonhardt [00:03:57] We live in a society with enormous economic and racial inequality. And what that means is that in virtually any measure in our society, you see large class and racial gaps. So there are gaps in life expectancy, there are gaps in poverty rates, there are gaps in income, there are gaps in wealth. There are gaps in almost every measure of health. They don’t always split neatly. Increasingly, I think we we often see and this is the case with education, too. It’s not that white Americans are on one side and nonwhite Americans are on the other. It’s often white and Asian Americans are on one side of the line. Latino Americans are sometimes closer to the middle, and Black and Native Americans often fare the worst. Those are also the groups that have experienced, of course, the most sustained discrimination in our country. And so when you look at test scores, you also see these gaps. And I think one thing that the people often argued was that the tests were causing the gaps, that there was something inherent in the S.A.T. that made them classist or made them racist, as opposed to those tests picking up existing gaps in our society. I mean, I still remember hearing stories when I was in high school about words that the S.A.T. supposedly had like yacht on it, that you had to define yacht. I don’t know whether that was true back in the 1980s when I was in high school. But the more recent research has not documented any actual class or racial bias on the test itself. So then the question is, is the test merely picking up gaps that are there? Or is it more about things like test prep in which richer kids are able to do better on the S.A.T., mostly because they’re able to do test prep. And that’s where a lot of this debate ends up centering on questions like that.
Krys Boyd [00:06:00] So is test prep exclusively available to at least middle class or wealthier students? I mean, are there school districts that are offering test prep to less advantaged students?
David Leonhardt [00:06:11] There are. And I think the first thing it’s important to say is that, as is the case with almost any test preparing for, it means that you tend to do better than if you don’t prepare for it. And there are certainly very expensive services that you can use in order to prepare for the SAT. There are also free resources online like Khan Academy. There are resources that are not free but are quite inexpensive. You can go buy a book and take a test, take practice SATs and see how that goes. And so the research that most directly bears on this question of how important test prep is, is research done by a team of people, including Raj Chetty, who’s an economist at Harvard, and John Friedman, who’s an economist at Brown. And a bunch of other economists, David Deming, who’s also at Harvard. And what they found is really fascinating. So there’s a test called the NAEP, which most people have never heard of. And the fact that most people never heard of it is actually part of the beauty of the finding here. The NAEP is there is a national test that is often called the nation’s report card. So when you hear when you see headlines, the nation’s eighth graders are doing better or worse on math or the nation’s fourth graders are doing better and worse at reading that comes from the NAEP. Now, no one does test prep for the NAEP because there are no consequences for individual students. It’s a measure of schools, not students. So people don’t do NAEP prep. And yet the racial gaps on the NAEP are nearly identical. This research found to the racial gaps on the SAT. And what that suggests is that, yes, of course, test prep in an individual case can boost a student’s score, whether it’s the free kind of test prep or whether it’s the expensive kind. But on the whole, the gaps in the S.A.T. are not about the test. They’re not about test prep. They’re about the underlying inequalities that we have in our society. Or to put it another way, the S.A.T. is picking up something real rather than creating the class and racial gaps in our SAT scores.
Krys Boyd [00:08:26] What is the real thing that it’s picking up?
David Leonhardt [00:08:29] Racial and economic inequality in our society. There’s just a huge amount of it. We have huge economic inequality, huge racial inequality. Think about where rich kids go to school and think about where where poorer kids go to school. Richer kids are going to do better on fourth grade reading tests. They’re going to do better on fourth grade math tests. They’re going to do better on eighth grade tests, and they’re going to do better on 11th and 12th grade tests, which is what the SAT and the act are.
Krys Boyd [00:08:56] So what are some of the reasons that having a wealthy family might help you do better in school?
David Leonhardt [00:09:02] It’s a long list. Some of it we probably could never eliminate. And others. Parts of the gaps stem from choices that we have made as a society. So if your parents are wealthy, they are vastly more likely to be educated themselves. There are huge racial gap, a huge class gaps in in by education and racial gaps, too. But let’s focus on class for a minute. So what that means is your parents are much more likely to have books all over the house. They’re likely to have a higher of a larger vocabulary. They’re likely to use that vocabulary with you. If you grow up rich, you’re also more likely for your parents to be able to afford to send you to preschool, where you’re going to learn more about how to read. If you’re rich, you’re likely to be in a school district because of the way we fund our school districts. That has much more money and many more resources and often is more attractive. So the best public school teachers are going to move to that district. Some of the same things might apply to private schools. And so all of these are among the reasons where you’re also if you’re rich, you’re just much less likely to have stress in your life. You’re not you’re not a kid isn’t going to be worried that their mom is going to lose her job. A wealthy kid is much more likely to have two parents instead of one, which means they have more resources focused on them. And so it’s all the same reasons why we’ve just seen huge gaps in opportunity by class in our society.
Krys Boyd [00:10:30] Have test preparers tried to come through and eliminate any material that might unfairly disadvantage students who are very bright but have no life experience with, say, a regatta or, you know, yacht operation they have.
David Leonhardt [00:10:47] And I think the key thing is that’s just not what’s driving this at this point. It’s not that the tests asked ask about what a yacht is or a regatta is. It’s that, you know, the tests might ask about what a carbohydrate is. And if you have been lucky enough to go to a good school system in the United States, you’re much more likely to know what a carbohydrate is If you’ve gotten a really strong education. And we live in a society, unfortunately, in which you’re much more likely to have gotten a good education if you have more money to.
Krys Boyd [00:11:20] Do the SAT and the ACT David, assess strictly what students have learned, or are they also supposed to demonstrate inherent intellectual ability? Like how are they different from subject specific tests like AP exams, and how are they different from general measures of intelligence like an IQ test?
David Leonhardt [00:11:39] I think it’s sometimes hard to know exactly where that line is. I think that the simple answer to your question is both. They’re supposed to measure both. You often need knowledge in order to be able to puzzle things out and figure out the logic of it. Right. If you’re going to try to figure out how to fix a car engine, you both need some problem solving ability and you need more knowledge of a car than I, for example, have. If you’re going to solve a math problem on the SAT, you need some problem solving ability and you need some specific knowledge about that math. I mean, I think most people and I would certainly count myself among them among these people would do worse on the SAT today than when we were in high school. That’s not because we’re dumber or less capable than we were in high school. It’s because our subject specific knowledge has eroded over time.
Krys Boyd [00:12:32] I have often thought that I’m glad that I got into and out of college when I did. It does seem like there’s just a great deal more pressure on students now to get into I mean, elite universities, forget about it. But even schools that were, you know, excellent but but not necessarily considered elite.
David Leonhardt [00:12:51] Yes, there is. And there are a whole bunch of reasons for that. One, the market is nationalized a little bit. So back in the old days. My wife is from Houston. So back in the old days, the very top students whom my wife was growing up with would apply overwhelmingly to U.T., Austin and to Rice. And today they apply to UT, Austin and Rice and also top universities in California and the Northeast. And the same was true in the Northeast. A lot of the prestigious schools in the Northeast that are very famous had just a very large percentage of students from the northeast 30 or 40 years ago. And so the whole market is nationalized. Colleges have also admitted many more international students than they had in the past. And so and also relative to a few decades ago, the current crop of 18 year olds is a larger generation. Now it’s about to shrink again. But but there are multiple reasons why colleges is. College admissions are trickier than they used to be. But I’m not sure that the increased competitiveness of it is as unpleasant as it is. It deserves a spot on the list of of our nation’s biggest problems.
Krys Boyd [00:14:09] David, how did the initially partially pandemic motivated decision by some schools to not require these scores affect the way admissions staffers had to evaluate student applications?
David Leonhardt [00:14:23] So I’ve talked to a lot of admissions staffers about this. I’ve talked to them on the record, meaning I quote them with their names and I’ve talked to them off the record, particularly people who don’t necessarily want to be quoted. And I’ve heard a very similar story from large numbers of them, which is that the moving away from the SAT made it harder for them any ACT I often say the SAT for short, but the ACT and the SAT are both tests that students can take. Moving away from these standardized tests made it harder for admissions officers often to identify the best students, including it made it harder for them to identify the most promising lower income students in many situations. And so an example of a story that I would hear is, look, we don’t take enough kids to take everyone with A’s, in part because of how much grade inflation there has been in high school. And grade inflation in high school is a central part of this story. There are now so many kids who get all A’s in high school that it has become really difficult for admissions officers to use just grades when deciding to admit people. It is also hard for them to use things like essays and extracurriculars for a couple reasons. A large school like the University of Michigan gets so many applications that it can’t reasonably spend a lot of time reading these essays. I mean, some of these schools get tens of thousands of applications. And actually those very things essays, extracurriculars, those are the most biased by economic class. They’re more biased than grades or the SAT because if you think about it, we all know this from stories we have heard. Affluent parents help their students edit their essays. Affluent parents help their students do big, exciting trips where they learn foreign languages. And so if you’re making decisions based on essays and extracurriculars, that’s more class biased than anything. And so what admissions officers have said to me is they’re looking at a mix of kids, maybe from disadvantaged communities, say, in inland California, and they’re looking at ten kids, all of whom have straight A’s. And they’re and maybe they can admit two of those ten kids and they’re genuinely not sure which of those ten kids are going to be able to do the work and thrive at their universities and which will struggle. They don’t know among those ten kids who are the ones who are most deserving and would benefit most by coming to the university. Standardized tests helped them make those distinctions. And without those standardized tests, they were sometimes just guessing. And what colleges found and MIT is one of the colleges that studied this closely is that without test scores, students who they were admitting would sometimes struggle. Whereas when they were able to make decisions that took an took account of everything grades, test scores, essays, everything the students they admitted were often as diverse. And ended up being more successful once they were in college.
Krys Boyd [00:17:34] The extracurricular thing is very interesting. There’s kind of a like a like a war on among a lot of parents of a certain social class and level of privilege to make sure that their kids have the right extracurriculars that will stand out. I’m not arguing this is a bad thing. But not only do these things. Take money. They take time. So if you are from a family that really needs you to work at Subway or McDonald’s or the library after school, you just won’t be able to engage in this. Even though you may be picking up really interesting life skills and experiences at your minimum wage job.
David Leonhardt [00:18:09] Yes, And colleges say that they take it. They take into account students who’ve worked minimum wage jobs and they give them credit for that. And I think actually, colleges are better at doing so than they were ten years ago, the very elite colleges. But I still don’t think they do enough of it. They think they can control for the fact that, hey, this kid worked at McDonald’s and this other kid learned a new language, but they actually, in their minds, can’t fully control for it. And that’s one of the things that that the researchers have said, that as well-meaning as college admissions are, college admissions officers, are they they can’t fully strip away the fact that if you go to private school, you’re going to get a often a beautifully written recommendation from your counselors at public school. People who don’t send their kids to public school may not know this, but at public schools, often the parents or the kids themselves are effectively writing their own recommendation because the guidance counselors just don’t have time to write 200 recommendations. They don’t know all the kids there. So, yes, it’s absolutely an issue.
Krys Boyd [00:19:14] Why has grade inflation happened? Is it that more students of high school age understand the importance of making straight A’s, or is there something else going on?
David Leonhardt [00:19:25] Yeah, it’s something else going on, Krys yeah, I mean, I think it’s I think it’s a little bit of an arms race, right? I think over time, basically in more places, families, parent students have put pressure on teachers to give better grades. I think teachers have realized that often it’s easier to give better grades. I don’t think we’ve had administrators backing up teachers and saying, hey, we’re going to stick to this curve. I just think it ends up being easier for everyone involved or seems easier for everyone involved. If we give better grades, we get to have more kids stand up at graduation and and with impressive sounding GPAs. And, you know, sometimes the cliche about how kids today are being raised, where they all get a trophy no matter what. Sometimes that’s exaggerated. But there’s an aspect of that with grade inflation that’s real. And so grades are just there are less meaningful measure of academic performance and preparation than they once were.
Krys Boyd [00:20:30] So I remember reading a few years ago that high school grades were a better indicator of how someone was likely to fare in college than SAT scores. Has that changed because of grade inflation, or was it maybe never true?
David Leonhardt [00:20:48] So I think it might have been true. But actually, Krys, I think that’s a really important little history to dig into for a minute. So I think that’s an example of something that people who don’t like standardized test really, really deeply wanted to believe. And so they ended up believing it more than it was true. And I just to speak for a minute here about our political tribes. This, as I said, the people making decisions at colleges are overwhelmingly on the left, half of the political spectrum. And I know many people on the left feel like they’re on the side of science when it comes to Covid vaccines and global warming and other things. I mean, on those two things, I would argue actually the political left is more on the side of science, Covid vaccines and global warming. But we are all susceptible to believing what we want to believe. And what happened with SATs was there were a couple of studies that found grades were a little bit better than SATs at predicting college performance from the past. It’s no longer true, you’re right. But just because grades are a little better at predicting college performance than SATs doesn’t mean we should want to get rid of SATs. All the research has always showed that if you combine grades with standardized test scores, you do a better job of understanding how people are going to do in college than if you look at only one. And I would encourage people to think of something like a college orchestra or a college basketball team for a minute. Let’s imagine we found some sort of test or exercise that helped identify who was going to be a good violinist or who was going to be a good three point shooter. Can you imagine the conductor of the orchestra or the coach of the basketball team deciding that they were going to ignore a useful piece of data about how good someone would be at something? Because there were other pieces of data that were also good. No one would do that in a situation like music or sports. But what happened with academics, which is the most important thing that colleges are. You see is that people were so eager to get rid of standardized tests that they ran to this research, again, which has since flipped, showing that grades were slightly better at predicting college grades, high school grades were slightly better at predicting college grades in SATs, that the colleges used this as a justification to ignore SATs and ACTs, which were always a useful piece of information. And then over time, because of grade inflation, standardized tests became better than grades substantially so. So the University of California did a review several years ago. They found that S.A.T. was better than grades and that the gap was growing over time. More recent research by this team at Harvard and Brown and elsewhere has found the same thing, which is that SAT and ACT are now better at predicting how you’ll do in college than grades. John Friedman, who’s an economist at Brown, has done some of this research. I quoted him saying that standardized tests have vastly more predictive power than most people understand.
Krys Boyd [00:23:55] Why did MIT specifically return to requiring test scores from all applicants?
David Leonhardt [00:24:02] MIT is kind of hardcore. They’re there. Their goal is to identify students who have a chance to make the scientific discoveries that can save our lives and come up with the technological innovations that can strengthen our military and create new companies that that that make our country prosperous. And they looked at their own evidence and they did a version of this analysis that I just described about the basketball team or the orchestra. And they said, this is useful information. We’re supposed to be in the business of rigorous analysis. It would be madness for us to ignore, willfully ignore meaningful information about how prepared students are to come here and how likely they are to succeed when they get here.
Krys Boyd [00:24:50] We should note here this article focuses mainly on highly selective schools, the so-called Ivy Plus. Most college bound Americans will not end up at one of these institutions. They will probably do just fine if they graduate and start a career. But to what extent do these kinds of schools set the template for how other universities do things?
David Leonhardt [00:25:10] First of all, as you just mentioned, many, many schools are in the business, mostly of accepting students, not rejecting students. In fact, the president of Arizona State, Michael Crow, likes to emphasize, while all these other universities are out there trying to figure out how many people we can reject here at Arizona State, we’re trying to figure out how many people we can educate. And there are a lot of schools like that. And for them, the SAT in the act is certainly much less useful. In some cases it may be irrelevant or they may just simply want to see that students can clear a certain bar to give them confidence that they can do the work there. And so you are absolutely right. This is very much focused on the more selective colleges. I still think those colleges matter. They are the colleges that tend to have the most resources. So they are the colleges where as a society, we should want to be funneling the students who are most likely to make scientific discoveries that can benefit all of us. But going to a school like the University of Wisconsin or like the University of Chicago or like Rice, that really does give students more opportunities. And so as a society, I do think we have an interest in figuring out which students should be there and how we want those colleges to build their classes.
Krys Boyd [00:26:29] I think, if I’m not mistaken, you went to Yale. Is that correct?
David Leonhardt [00:26:33] I did.
Krys Boyd [00:26:34] Do you as someone who covers education, I imagine you keep up with this. I mean, how has diversity at Yale evolved since the time you were there in the early 90s?
David Leonhardt [00:26:45] Yale is a much more diverse place than when I was there. I was a financial aid student in the early 90s, and one of the memories that I still very much have was walking through the post office, which was a central gathering place of campus back in the days when we all got a lot of mail. And there was a student selling a t shirt there and he said $10 or free if you bursar billet. And so the bursar bill was the way you basically put something on the bill that your parents would pay. And I remember thinking that the student wasn’t doing anything cruel, but I remember thinking, what an assumption there. My parents could have afforded a $10 t shirt for me. I’m not pretending otherwise, but I would have thought about it before billing my parents $10 for a t shirt. $10 meant something to my parents. And there were so many affluent kids there that the notion for most of them was that just charging your parents some extra money is akin to having something be free. Yale still doesn’t look like America in terms of how many high income students it has. The same is true of all these schools, by the way, including public schools, selective public schools. But several of these schools are substantially more economically diverse than they were a couple of decades ago. So at many of the most elite colleges, the ones that have done better by the score, they now have approaching 20% of their students receiving Pell Grants, which is the largest federal financial aid program. And as a rough rule of thumb, Pell Grants go to people in the bottom 50% of the of the population. You compare that to the past when the Pell Grant percentage at a lot of these schools was closer to 10%. I’ve written a lot about economic diversity, higher education. I’ve been really critical of a lot of these schools. There are still a lot that have a long way to go to meet up with what they say are their own ideals. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that a lot of these colleges have made substantial progress over the decades in not just enrolling affluent kids.
Krys Boyd [00:28:59] To your point, when students who have done well in high school maybe done well on these tests, get accepted into elite schools, but then fail to thrive there? I mean, conventional wisdom says somehow the student couldn’t hack it. Often the student themselves feels like the fault lies with them. Is this also, though, a failure of their universities? To some extent.
David Leonhardt [00:29:19] It is a failure of their universities, and I think to some extent it’s a failure of the whole system. I mean, look, I do think there is an honest case against standardized tests. And I think it goes something like this. And you will hear people make it if your listeners go online and read the article that I wrote in The Times, they’ll see that I quote one of the folks who makes this make this case. They basically argue, you know what, We should be using our most resourced universities, public and private, not to teach our most prepared students the ones who are most likely to to succeed and thrive as as budding scientists. But we should use them above all as places of of engines, of social mobility. And we should instead treat admissions to a place like the University of Texas or like Harvard, more like a lottery. So you clear a certain bar, get a certain GPA in high school, you get a certain SAT score, and we’re basically then going to turn it into a lottery and we’re going to say, you get a lottery ticket, we’re going to make sure the students were admitting are a mix of men and women, a mix of different races, a mix of different classes. And that’s how we’re going to use the resources of these universities. I think that the problem is twofold. One, most Americans don’t agree with that. If you look at polling, most Americans overwhelming majorities and it’s and it’s across races believe that colleges should use standardized tests as one factor in admissions. And then I think the other thing I would say is that the kind of ACT crowd that isn’t actually the argument that most of them have made, they have instead claimed that actually you get no good information from the SAT or that it’s impossible to admit underrepresented minorities if you use the SAT which is not true. There are substantial numbers of black and Latino students who do quite well on the SAT and so to me, there is an honest argument, the kind of lottery argument, but it tends to be unpopular. And actually, the argument that the anti-Saddam crowd tends to make isn’t actually the lottery argument. It’s the argument that the SAT is so biased that it contains no useful information, which I just don’t think is consistent with the facts.
Krys Boyd [00:31:44] David, this lottery system, you know, setting minimum requirements for admission and then just putting out a lottery for anyone who meets those requirements to be selected is interesting. I can understand that. It it makes people uncomfortable because we definitely like this idea that, you know, getting into a good school is based primarily on merit and a lottery seems more like luck. I mean, it’s also lucky to be born to wealthy parents in a good neighborhood with good schools. But we’ll set that aside. There is, though, the question of of how, you know, if anyone has experimented with this. And I’m thinking about K-12 public school systems that have some special magnet schools that do select students by lotteries. What have we learned from those institutions?
David Leonhardt [00:32:31] Many of those urban charters there are a wide variety of charter schools and on average, charter schools, K through 12 perform very similar to non charter schools. But there are a certain model of charter schools which tend to be these high expectations. Some people have heard of Kipp, which is a nationwide chain. Some people have heard of how much New Orleans shifted toward this model after Katrina. And those specific schools have a very good record in closing education gaps and educating students. Well, it comes with a cost. They tend to have fewer extracurriculars. They don’t they’re so structured that they don’t quite work for everybody. Not sure they would work for me. I wasn’t a kid who loved structure, but but they really work for huge numbers of kids and they do quite well. I think it becomes a little bit trickier to think about in terms of college. So because these colleges play such a big research role and are feeders for future research. So I know many people think of climate change as an existential threat in our society. I think that is a fair analysis. I think it’s an enormous threat given the threat of climate change. Do we want a system where we are funneling our young people who seem to have the best possibility of discovering breakthroughs in climate science? Do we want a system where we’re funneling them to the institutions where they are most likely able to do that kind of research? Or do we want something more like the kind of lottery we would have in a public school high school system? And I think most Americans probably think that we should be funneling the students who are best prepared and most likely to achieve scientific breakthroughs, whether it’s in clean energy or whether it’s in curing cancer to institutions like UCLA and like MIT and like Stanford, where they are most likely to get the training to be able to do that. But there are tradeoffs because by doing it this way, these institutions are serving less of the role that those high schools that you mentioned are serving.
Krys Boyd [00:34:49] So you noted that people who oppose these tests or the use of these tests think they may be biased and on useful because they reveal that privileged students tend to do better than lower income students, black students, Native American students, again, as groups. Something that will stick with me from the piece. Is that you found that, you know, data also reveal larger percentages of, say, black and native students than white students live in poverty in this country. We don’t automatically assume that means those data about household income are compromised. We recognize that it’s a problem, that those inequities exist, but we don’t necessarily think whatever they’re showing us are fake.
David Leonhardt [00:35:34] That’s right. We don’t say, my goodness, black poverty is higher than white poverty. Therefore we need to get rid of the poverty rate or I haven’t heard that very often. That’s the kind of thing that the Chinese government does, right? Youth unemployment rose a lot in China recently, so they got rid of the youth unemployment measure. I do think, though, that there is something that’s important to think about with the SAT and race and class. If we moved to a system in which basically all we were doing was making decisions on college admissions based on the SAT or ACT, that would have huge problems. The good news is virtually no colleges doing that. It’s not that as long as you get a 1600, you get into Harvard. In fact, more students get a 1600 than Harvard can admit, period. And so they’re not just limiting themselves to students who get a 1600. That has a particularly important implication for race and class as so long as students. And let’s stick with class because the Supreme Court has has has made it illegal for these schools to to consider race as such. We can come back to that if you want. If a school if a college instead looks at a student and says, wait a second, this student got a 1200, but she got to 1200, growing up with one parent in a community where only 20% of the students go on to college. That is incredibly impressive. She was running with a stiff wind in her face and she nonetheless got a 1200 and she got straight A’s. And that not only is a mark that she is an incredibly deserving student for what she overcame, but also as a student with massive potential. And let’s imagine that the school, the college admitted that student while rejecting a student who maybe got a 1500 on the SATs, 300 points higher in the SAT is out of 600 for. People who aren’t who aren’t familiar with it. But that student who got the 1500 maybe had all the advantages in the world, and maybe she was only the fifth best student at her high school who is applying to that very same college. I think some people would say that it was unfair to admit the student with the 1200 over the student with the 1500. I would disagree. I think it’s fair. I think you can argue that the student with the 1200 accomplished more and you can change the numbers. If the gap I picked was too big to be comfortable to you. That is how colleges are using the SAT. They are not using it to say we’re always going to take the higher score over the lower score. They’re often using it specifically to say, we need the SAT to tell us which of the low income students who’ve overcome a lot are capable. A student who gets straight A’s and gets a 1200 on the set is going to be able to succeed at a vast, vast number of elite colleges, particularly if she’s someone who didn’t have a lot of advantages. And that’s showing she overcame some student with straight A’s and got a 900 on the SAT is probably going to struggle at those same colleges. And so to some extent, what the colleges are doing by looking at standardized test is they are looking for something that can help them distinguish between kids who come from difficult backgrounds, who actually are going to be able to do the work at their school and who are going to struggle to do the work and probably not thrive and maybe not even graduate at those schools.
Krys Boyd [00:38:59] So look, David, I am now emotionally invested in this hypothetical student who got a 1200 on her SAT, but overcame all kinds of hardships. And I believe those kinds of stories happen. But I’m not sure that I believe that, you know, the most elite schools that are processing tens of thousands of applications every year are lovingly combing through every application to find those students. I wonder how many get missed if the starting point perhaps is some kind of algorithm that, you know, weeds students out based on their scores.
David Leonhardt [00:39:34] Some are going to get missed. But I actually think there’s a chance that more get missed without standardized test scores than with standardized test scores. And certainly more students miss out on opportunities. So let’s go to the world without SAT scores, where you’re looking at a whole bunch of students with straight A’s. At that point, you’re a little bit into the lottery. And the the students from straight A’s with straight A’s who you take from the suburban school districts or from the magnet schools like Stuyvesant in New York or T.J. in suburban Virginia, they’re probably going to do fine. But some number of the students from the less advantaged backgrounds are going to struggle. And not only that, but some number of students from less advantaged backgrounds who you rejected because you didn’t have room to take, everybody would have thrived at an elite school and you would have changed their family’s entire trajectory potentially by taking them. So I’m not sure there is a scenario where we get to ensure that we don’t overlook any kids. I think the question often ends up being with the trade offs of who were accepting and who were rejecting. Are these schools, first of all, committed to diversity? Some are, some still aren’t. And they’re just overwhelmingly accepting kids from higher income places, the ones that are committed to diversity. I think it makes it a lot easier for them to identify the really high performing kids. If they take standardized tests into account. And one of the things that weighed the most heavily on me was talking to people at universities. Dartmouth was one of the early movers here. They dug into the data really deeply. I talk about it in the article. And the administrators there just said, boy, without these tests, it was becoming harder for us to admit the really talented kids from less advantaged backgrounds. And that’s deeply important to us to do.
Krys Boyd [00:41:39] You mentioned earlier, David, of course, the Supreme Court has said schools cannot consider a student’s race as a factor for, you know, choosing who gets into the school and who doesn’t. What have you seen? What have we seen in terms of how diversity of enrollment has changed at the most prestigious universities in this country since that ruling?
David Leonhardt [00:42:02] It’s been a real mix. So on average, the percentage of black kids has declined. The percentage of Latino kids has declined a little bit. The picture with Asian kids is a little bit harder to follow because after all the discussion of anti-Asian admissions, discrimination in college admissions, that was part of these legal cases. It seems that more Asian kids left their race off their applications this year. So we don’t know as much. But on average, we have seen the kinds of effects we might have guessed, but probably smaller than some people forecast and just much more variety. So some schools have actually basically held steady, really elite schools with black and Latino kids. And some schools have seen pretty significant declines. I think it’s going to take more years for it to shake out. We’ve seen that with public schools. So, for example, the two most selective public schools in California are Berkeley and UCLA. California banned race based affirmative action more than 25 years ago. The number of black students at Berkeley fell really fell really a lot initially and has never fully recovered. At UCLA, it fell a lot and has since recovered. Whereas the number of Latino students has has risen really quite sharply at both. So my guess is over time, it’s going to be different at different schools, and it’s not necessarily going to be a simple story of everything going in the direction that that you expect.
Krys Boyd [00:43:42] It seems unquestionably worth continuing to apply scientific rigor to this question of what standardized college entrance exams can reveal and what they can’t and how they can be used, you know, most effectively and most equitably. It is interesting, though, this debate over the use of the SATs and ACT and whether or not they’re terminally flawed measures of individual students are really predictive ones. It’s a distraction from the problem we have in K-12 education, that it is not equal in this country. It really depends what zip code you live in.
David Leonhardt [00:44:15] Yes. Yes. And so I still think it’s important to talk about for all the reasons you and I have been talking about Chris, which is who goes to places like UCLA and Princeton and these other schools really matters. And so we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. We should think about what kind of system we want. Do we want those schools to be dominated by rich kids? I would argue no. Do we want them to be lotteries? I would argue no. In between those two, how do we kind of get our way to something that feels like it is both fair and serves society’s interest? Those questions matter. Now, we we also need to remember exactly what you said, which is in terms of how many people they affect directly. There are other questions that matter much more. So one of the things that I’ve also written about in The New York Times is the problem with how low graduation rates are at many of the colleges that educate large numbers of of middle class and working class and poor kids. And not only are the graduation rates overall worrisome, really low, but some schools are thriving. So what can we learn from the schools that enroll large numbers of lower income kids and actually seem to be educating them and getting them to graduation and getting them employed in good jobs? And what should we do with the schools that aren’t doing that? How can they learn from the other schools? Maybe how can we introduce more accountability for those schools that those colleges that have really low graduation rates? And as you said, because of our highly localized system of K-through-12 education, we have this system in which rich towns, the very places where you might think that students need less resources to succeed because of all their advantages at home and elsewhere, often get more resources in school because of the way local taxes work. These are huge sources of American inequality. And if we could make even modest progress on that kind of K through 12 inequality, it would make solving the issues of inequality and access to opportunity much easier in higher education.
Krys Boyd [00:46:33] David Leonhardt is a senior writer at The New York Times, where you can find his article, “The Misguided War on the SAT.” David, it’s always nice to speak with you. Thank you for making the time.
David Leonhardt [00:46:43] Thank you so much for having me, Krys. I appreciate it.
Krys Boyd [00:46:45] Think is distributed by PRX, The public radio exchange our website think.kera.org is a good place to find out about upcoming shows and to sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
