"By making college entrance exams universal and fair, we allow talented poor kids to earn the kind of distinctiveness that money can’t buy." This is an odd statement. Is a high SAT score a distinction that is earned? When we say that someone has earned something we generally mean they have worked for it, and that it is the product of sustained effort. A high SAT score is not earned in that sense.
I believe that a rational college admissions should be designed to help students find the college that is the optimal fit for them, whether it is Harvard or Washington U. or Reed or Morehouse. Prof. Deming seems to assume that all students should try to attend the most selective and prestigious school they can get in. Why? So that they will have a better chance of getting a job with McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. These are the "high stakes" to which he refers. His vision of academia is zero-sum and hierarchal. Harvard's purpose is to maintain its position at the top of the heap and choose which 18 year olds will be their generation's super-elite. And because Harvard is choosing elites, it follows that admissions should be based not merely on who is likely to do the best at Harvard, but on Harvard's notion of what desirable elites should look like in the U.S. That means "talented poor kids" should be given the nod over talented upper-middle class kids, even when Harvard knows that the talented upper-middle class kids are likely to perform better academically.
I doubt that Ivy League admissions policies really matter that much to life outcomes, notwithstanding Prof. Deming's waitlist study. Higher education in most other countries is much more stratified. Going to Oxbridge or one of the grande ecoles is a bigger advantage than the Ivy League + Stanford because there is a larger gap between them and lower tier schools than in the U.S. Ending up at Swarthmore or Chicago or Rice or UVa instead of Princeton is not much of a disadvantage.
I'm quite curious how the calculus shifts at a "Non-Ivy-plus" institution, namely a large public university that presumably has less resources to evaluate individual students and thus relies more heavily on test scores for admissions decisions and is more likely to attract students for whom there is a big mismatch between test scores and, say, high school GPA (my guess is that gap is comparatively smaller at places like the Ivies).
What do you think is driving the reporting gap of high test scores between low income and high income applicants? Is it that high income applicants have access to college counselors who have a better sense of where the threshold is where sending a test score is a net-positive?
I was always under the impression that when Bowdoin went test optional almost 40 years ago and then other small elites shifted in that direction more recently it was a way to admit athletes, legacies and diversity candidates without harming your reported SAT averages. Bigger schools like the Ivies maybe less an issue but Dartmouth isn't really that big. With the ongoing risk of litigation after the Harvard case i am surprised these Ivies are going back to standardized test requirements because in any investigation the breaks the schools give to some groups is more obvious.
If you care about merit why not also mentioned how unfair legacy admissions are? Or the huge boost in admission rate given to kids from
extremely rich families even after adjusting for sat scores?
Or the costs to millions of average kids who are now required to take this newly required high stake sat tests?
"By making college entrance exams universal and fair, we allow talented poor kids to earn the kind of distinctiveness that money can’t buy." This is an odd statement. Is a high SAT score a distinction that is earned? When we say that someone has earned something we generally mean they have worked for it, and that it is the product of sustained effort. A high SAT score is not earned in that sense.
I believe that a rational college admissions should be designed to help students find the college that is the optimal fit for them, whether it is Harvard or Washington U. or Reed or Morehouse. Prof. Deming seems to assume that all students should try to attend the most selective and prestigious school they can get in. Why? So that they will have a better chance of getting a job with McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. These are the "high stakes" to which he refers. His vision of academia is zero-sum and hierarchal. Harvard's purpose is to maintain its position at the top of the heap and choose which 18 year olds will be their generation's super-elite. And because Harvard is choosing elites, it follows that admissions should be based not merely on who is likely to do the best at Harvard, but on Harvard's notion of what desirable elites should look like in the U.S. That means "talented poor kids" should be given the nod over talented upper-middle class kids, even when Harvard knows that the talented upper-middle class kids are likely to perform better academically.
I doubt that Ivy League admissions policies really matter that much to life outcomes, notwithstanding Prof. Deming's waitlist study. Higher education in most other countries is much more stratified. Going to Oxbridge or one of the grande ecoles is a bigger advantage than the Ivy League + Stanford because there is a larger gap between them and lower tier schools than in the U.S. Ending up at Swarthmore or Chicago or Rice or UVa instead of Princeton is not much of a disadvantage.
I'm quite curious how the calculus shifts at a "Non-Ivy-plus" institution, namely a large public university that presumably has less resources to evaluate individual students and thus relies more heavily on test scores for admissions decisions and is more likely to attract students for whom there is a big mismatch between test scores and, say, high school GPA (my guess is that gap is comparatively smaller at places like the Ivies).
What do you think is driving the reporting gap of high test scores between low income and high income applicants? Is it that high income applicants have access to college counselors who have a better sense of where the threshold is where sending a test score is a net-positive?
I was always under the impression that when Bowdoin went test optional almost 40 years ago and then other small elites shifted in that direction more recently it was a way to admit athletes, legacies and diversity candidates without harming your reported SAT averages. Bigger schools like the Ivies maybe less an issue but Dartmouth isn't really that big. With the ongoing risk of litigation after the Harvard case i am surprised these Ivies are going back to standardized test requirements because in any investigation the breaks the schools give to some groups is more obvious.