>> Importantly, these test scores better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants and high-achieving applicants who attend high schools for which Dartmouth has less information to interpret the transcripts.
Precisely. SATs aren't about hurting the poor or disadvantaged. It's about giving them a chance.
>> Third, under test-optional policies, some less-advantaged students withhold test scores even in cases where providing the test score would be a significant positive signal to Admissions. Importantly, Dartmouth Admissions uses SAT scores within context; a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a lower-income community with lower school-wide test scores is a more significant achievement than a score of 1400 for an applicant from a high school in a higher-income community with higher school-wide test scores. Admissions uses numerous detailed measures of outcomes at the high school and neighborhood levels to account for these known disadvantages. As one example, Admissions computes a measure of how each applicant performs on standardized tests relative to the aggregate score of all test-takers in their high school, using data available from the College Board.
And this is how you again discriminate based on race in a post-Affirmative Action world. The weight they assign to each context is completely arbitrary and tuned to achieve whatever objectives they have.
They're explicitly tying academic performance in relation to one's socioeconomic background. I find their claim of "doing more with less being more impressive than doing more with more" reasonable.
The only way to avoid any sort of judgmental/arbitrary calls is to blindly apply academic standards (the way UT Austin does top 4% of your HS class) and that comes with its own problems.
If you have two families that are equally poor, but where one family cares a lot about education and sends their kid to the harder school (perhaps by living in the cheapest apartment in the neighborhood that is eligible for that school), they will be disadvantaged compared to the other family, who send their kids to the less rigorous school.
To the extent that there are racial/cultural correlations that result in poor Asian kids going to schools that have higher average SATs than poor kids of other races, an ostensibly race-neutral policy like this will mean Asian students could (as a group) continue to face disadvantages in the admissions process.
In a post-SFFA vs Harvard world, anecdotes and thought experiments carry very little water. We all know - and the universities are very explicit about this - that socio-economic indicators are the new affirmative action. It's clearly the only practical way to effect the sort of diversity missions that many Universities seek to establish (since by their own published work, it correlates with strong community-wide academic and scholarly outcomes0. At this point, since we all know what's going on, the only question to ask is, "Why didn't you try to game the system since you know how it works?"
I'm not passing judgment on whether this is a good or a bad thing, whether it's honest or dishonest, or whether it's fair or not. It's just reality. SFFA v Harvard is a _horrible_ decision based on absurd jurisprudence and a total divorce from the truths of the world we live in. I commend everyone from admissions boards to clever families who learn how to play the new rules of the game better than those who backed the jurisprudence in the first place.
Yes, I think they would use this as a facially-neutral way to achieve a race-motivated goal.
> We all know - and the universities are very explicit about this - that socio-economic indicators are the new affirmative action. It's clearly the only practical way to effect the sort of diversity missions that many Universities seek to establish
Are you saying they want to have racial diversity or SES diversity?
> SFFA v Harvard is a _horrible_ decision based on absurd jurisprudence and a total divorce from the truths of the world we live in. I commend everyone from admissions boards to clever families who learn how to play the new rules of the game better than those who backed the jurisprudence in the first place.
Can I ask what you found so objectionable? I understand that many people disagree with the outcome, but from a legal perspective (IAAL), I haven't heard much criticism.
Because of structural racism and similar phenomena, they're not fully separable. It's not obvious to me they're even separable in a meaningful way (meaning that if you optimize for one, you simply won't get the same result as if you were to optimize for the other).
> Can I ask what you found so objectionable? I understand that many people disagree with the outcome, but from a legal perspective (IAAL), I haven't heard much criticism.
(IANAL, and it's been quite a while since I spent cycles on this so my recollection may be fuzzy) Fundamentally, I'm very uncomfortable with the dissonance in the concurring/dissenting opinions of Thomas/Sotomayor, respectively. My understanding was that they basically argue that the proposed standards by SFFA's lawyers are effectively unworkable, yet at the same time, there's very little to indicate that many - if any - universities were actually already out-of-compliance. In fact, in the aftermath of the case it seems as if most universities simply publicly doubled down on their existing diversity policies and missions.
So what's the point here? Why did SCOTUS accept to hear this? It seems like it was just taken up so that Roberts could fire up culture wars with the commentary he made in the majority opinion he authored.
It's hard to find virtue in something that claims to do a lot but in practice seems to do virtually nothing. So maybe it's incorrect to state that this is based on "absurd jurisprudence," but I can't find anything redeeming or positive to state about the opinion or the process that took us here.
They accepted the case because they wanted to end race-based affirmative action.
In terms of the dissents, they were completely out of step with the Court’s affirmative action jurisprudence. Going all the way back to Bakke (1978), the Court has never approved of any rationale for race-based affirmative action other than the ‘diversity rationale’. This states that colleges may use affirmative action in order to improve the educational experience by admitting more students of different racial backgrounds. The dissents employed fiery rhetoric but were not shooting for the diversity rationale. As a result, their arguments were destined to fail.
They typically go out-of-state, but the competition for the next 4% is insane.
> whatever objectives
They're very clear about their objectives too - they want more of their student body to come from a background of lower socioeconomic status.
The fact is if they're in a public school in an underserved area, they are most likely going to a disadvantaged public school, and face strong headwinds trying to achieve the kinds of scores kids in affluent neighborhoods get.
Note also that multiple factors are being looked at.
Generally when such systems are implemented the levels are not binary, e.g. housing project vs affluent suburb. My point was that for some bimodal neighborhoods using the neighborhood income average is not effective. Is there a national, annually updated list of neighborhood underserved-ness list?
This came up in Boston Public Schools. Admission to Boston Latin took into account the portion of a student body eligible for free lunch. It became mathematically impossible to be admitted to Latin if you weren't coming from a low income school.
I don't believe this is true, but if you have citations I'd be happy to hear them.
For instance, their accountability data [1] shows that, in 2023, out of 409 kids taking their ELA MCAS test, 92 were categorized as "low income."
I find this hard to square with your statement (all students came from low-income schools but 88% are not low income?).
1. https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/accountability/report/district...
A student attending a school without bonus points would need to score 97 points. Class rank is a factor which effectively imposes quotas on schools regardless of students grades and or test scores. Back around 2016 there were a handful of schools where students needed to score in excess of 100 points to get into Latin.
Last year 408 high income students received bonus points while 29 low income students did not. The admission rates for these groups were 85% and 55% respectively. [1]
[0] https://archive.is/20220203094548/https://www.bostonglobe.co... [1] https://archive.is/20231107020144/https://www.bostonglobe.co...
No they aren’t. They’re selling a product to the highest bidder but happen to work in an industry where social and cultural expectations don’t allow them to sell exclusively to highest bidders. Adjusting to those expectations is ever changing as we’re seeing here.
It’s an unfortunate fact that high bidder’s children roughly correlate with high potential (somewhat impolite to point out), so colleges these days can still point to success stories and pretend they did something.
This would be far more disastrous if spots at colleges were scarce, but they overwhelmingly are not. There are over 15 million undergraduate students in the United States, and we are undergoing a demographic collapse (https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...). In 2 years, the children of the baby bust (2008-2009) will start applying and enrolling in college, and because there are fewer of them, they will have an easier time getting into the college of their choice.
>95% of us do not attend Ivy League schools. Removing any and all affirmative action would help, at best, five thousand students? This is a manufactured issue. No one is denied a college education because of affirmative action. Any time spent arguing against it is wasted.
This would allow students to have a lower-stress life and have an advantage at college admissions — even if they actually learned less academically than they would have at the rigorous high school.
Of course, this is a dynamic system, and if enough high-scoring kids migrate to less-rigorous schools then the advantage would be diluted. But at the same time, kids who previously would have gone to that less-rigorous school will now be measured against a different standard, since their school would no longer be one that has a very low average SAT. Basically, it's complicated, and there are weird incentives at play.
I don't know. Look at parent's address, correlate with census and income, look at SAT, and be done with it. Solved lol.
the schools are in most cases public, in which case there is a mandate for many of these statistics. public money pays, so show us what you're getting for it. this is especially the case given poor and underprivileged students, who have been the focus of many studies (and some targeted funding efforts).
the middle school to HS to college pipeline also isn't new at all, and has been tracked for decades.
whats really more shocking to me is not that it's happening, but that more people aren't abusing it aggressively.
(I don't know how true this "key idea" actually is. I can imagine ways in which poverty might disadvantage people that would persist through their time at university. But it seems plausible prima facie.)
Since I encountered a similar approach just three years ago in my son's High School application in the Chicago Public School System I can say this leaves a lot to be desired non low-info,e families. Here's a high-level summary of how it works:
1. Chicago is neighborhoods are assigned one of (if memory serves) four levels, which represent socioeconomic levels.
2. With the thought that the economic level is proportional to school quality (this is more true in most places in the US than other countries, since a big chunk of school budget comes from property taxes, so neighborhoods with low taxes get school with lower budgets) scores from the entrance exams for kids from different levels are boosted by different multipliers.
Now, of course, (2) is a travesty of the US but that's another long discussion. The problem with (1) is that the neighborhood to level assignments are not revised each year. So you can be affluent in a district that has gentrified in the past 2-5 years and your kid will get the low-income boost unfairly.
Additionally some neighborhoods are highly bimodal, eg take Lakeview. This is considered a low-income neighborhood but there are many high-income high rises and single family homes within its borders. Alternately, there are many rental condos in our neighborhood which is the highest income level, so these middle income kids get slammed.
Still another problem is families purposefully gaming the system. We had friends who changed their rental condo during their child's 8th year so they can get a lower-info,e address sin their application. This is widely known and done.
Perhaps a better approach would be to use the family's income rather than communities.
Edit: I had more time to research and found the following, in case somebody is interested:
* What I referred to as the four levels are actually called tiers
* The tiers are actually updated every year, so I was wrong above. Still, the community average criticism stands. See the discussion about the update that was done last Feb here: https://chicagoschooloptions.com/forums/topic/when-are-cps-t...
* You can see the distribution of the tiers from a few years ago on this site: http://cpstiers.opencityapps.org, owners say it's no longer maintained. It seems currently there's no map showing all tiers, you can check only a single address at https://schoolinfo.cps.edu/schoollocator/index.html
> First offered in 1926 by the College Board... Early proponents of the SAT argued that the admissions exam made higher education more meritocratic. Admissions officers at elite institutions like Harvard believed the test would identify talented applicants at less academically strong high schools and accelerate their journeys into higher education. [1]
Now it's a starting level filter. You're not getting in because of top scores, but you will get rejected because of bad scores absent a massive alternative hook. People that get in have top scores and other superhuman traits.
That's probably a good thing imo. It indicates that our overall expectations for our elites is on the rise, which translates to better outcomes on net down the line when they actually get fast tracked into positions of power. Those of us who are smart and lazy similarly benefit because many more of us are able to find less taxing jobs plying our expertise at the right hands of these elites for very comfortable wages, rather than being forced into the millstone of the C suite ourselves.
> It’s worth acknowledging a crucial part of this story. Dartmouth admits disadvantaged students who have scores that are lower on average than those of privileged students. The college doesn’t apologize for that. Students from poor neighborhoods or troubled high schools have effectively been running with wind in their face. They are not competing fairly with affluent teenagers.
> I also asked whether she was worried that conservative critics of affirmative action might use test scores to accuse Dartmouth of violating the recent Supreme Court ruling barring race-conscious admissions. She was not. Dartmouth can legally admit a diverse class while using test scores as one part of its holistic admissions process, she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/briefing/dartmouth-sat.ht...
I am conservative and I have no problem with poor students from disadvantaged backgrounds having their scores weighed differently.
I absolutely do have a problem with race-based admissions. Most conservatives have a problem with race-based admissions because it is not fair to poor students.
I remember a girl from my college (elite institution on west coast) that would go on and on about how disadvantaged she was because she was 'black'. Firstly, she's like a quarter black and looks completely white. Secondly, and more importantly, she's filthy rich. I mean... like multiple international trips a year growing up. Super picky about fashion, etc. Both parents had PhDs. Nevertheless, she qualified for all the diversity offerings the school had, including scholarships, special programs, etc.
Meanwhile, we had kids whose parents never attended college and grew up in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with very disadvantaged background, who were given nothing because of their race and sex.
Now, I'm certainly not part of the latter group (grew up middle class and am neither white nor black or any 'disadvantaged' minority) and frankly don't have a whole lot to lose in this debate, but seeing this with my own eyes has convinced me that we need to look at actual disadvantage, not just race. There are A LOT of high-achieving black, latinos, <insert minority here>. That's great! More power to them. I have no qualms with rich people.
I do have qualms when they pretend to be disadvantaged to get an advantage over obviously more disadvantaged others. This is annoying when Donald Trump does it. It's annoying when Elon Musk does it. And it's annoying if someone who's not white does it too.
The idea that simply because you're of a particular race, you're automatically disadvantaged is retarded.
I do hate to see poor and working class white male children pretty much hung out to dry in the eyes of progressives these days.
I completely agree that this used to be the case. I might even argue that it is still true to an extent. I will also agree that we should still address it. My problem is when addressing it involves discriminating against asian Americans like me. The people who want to discriminate against asian Americans are just using "historical disadvantage" as an excuse, their actions are political/ideological.
Please don't use slurs here. There's no need for that.
Is it really too much to ask people to come up with another word to use that hasn't been hurled at innocent people as an insult?
B. People who are of a certain race that get a 29 on their ACT are admitted over people of another race that get a 32.
It sounds like Dartmouth is doing A. The recent court cases had to do with schools that were doing B. If a college requires SAT/ACT tests and continues doing B, then it is pretty easy to see they are doing so based on objective data.
I believe those court cases are one of the reasons schools are moving to test optional--not because the SAT/ACT isn't useful to predict success at college, but because they see it as a liability in their acceptance process.
They may have a higher bar for "privileged" students, i.e. Asian/white, but the bar is far lower for the truly Privileged legacies/donors.
The point I was trying to make was that it appears many colleges may have an incentive to NOT require ACT SAT tests if they want to continue to use race or proxy for race and avoid what the report from Dartmouth is suggesting. Dartmouth looks like they are considering ACT/SAT along with the students background / opportunities, but specifically NOT treating people differently based on the color of their skin.
Dartmouth is assuming that they will get racial diversity just by getting better at selecting the best students instead of trying to penalize or reward people for the color of their skin.
There are other non-academic tests like CogAT, Wechsler, etc. that may be even better since they evaluate abstract reasoning and scale from young to old without significant modification. Those are used by gifted programs and organizations like Mensa. It’s possible that these would be adequate replacements for college admissions as well, but you may get a bunch of mildly on-spectrum kids who have never had to work hard for academic success (from my personal experience).
True, though if socioeconomic status were not correlated with race, then there would be much less of a reason to want to select based on race in the first place.
> There are other non-academic tests like CogAT, Wechsler, etc. that may be even better
They probably would, for a while. Anything different from the SAT/ACT but correlated with some sort of capability is going to do better when the problem is specialized preparation for existing tests. And that was precisely the problem that caused colleges to stop looking at SAT/ACT. It wasn't because the tests are bad. It was the usual "you make what you measure".
Switching tests isn't free, though. You lose all the historical data that show the association between a test and the specific outcome you care about (eg graduation rates at this institution). You have to go through a bootstrapping period, and by the time you're done, it's possible that people are now targeting the new test and it starts losing its utility too.
I think a lot of these types will probably also show up among the people who do extremely well on the SAT and ACT.
More generally, a 1600 is not some kind of "get into college free" card.
I did admissions for a very competitive university program many years ago and we primarily used test scores to establish a baseline. One reason was to make sure we only considered people who could handle the program's rigour, but equally valid was that the four of us couldn't possibly review thousands of applications so we needed an automatic filter. But after that filter we didn't pay attention to test scores except as a tiebreaker when filling the last few spots.
However, it sounds like their system works around this problem by weighting the test score based on the average score at the school. So they can still down-weight the application of a poor Asian student from a more challenging school, compared to a different minority student who goes to a school with worse SAT performance. If Dartmouth's percentage of Asian students doesn't tick upward materially in coming years, I would assume this is what they are doing.
To steelman the argument for this process, it's effectively boosting the scores of kids whose parents didn't care as much about education, or who had no avenue into a challenging school. On the other hand, this process dings students from families that prioritize education, who work really hard. Those kids would probably succeed at Dartmouth, and beyond.
Standardized exams are the most fair and transparent.
Materials and tutors are available easily for free or cheaply on the internet nowadays.
perhaps the _most_ fair right now, but certainly not what I would consider fair.
consider a middle class family that has secure food, housing, and transportation vs lower class family where the child might potentially have less consistent sleep, food, or has to work to help pay bills.
one has more distractions than the other.
Move all children to government controlled facilities and do not let them see their parents until they are some age like 21?
Or maybe we should get rid of all criteria for education and just do huge once a year lottery. You get one chance to enter. As poor people can not afford more.
Then you gotta make it affordable for them.
You can still have elite schools for the absolute best (though I would question that certain self-styled 'elite schools' are really principally selecting for that and not e.g. wealth or family connections), but that doesn't mean that you cannot raise the bar on public and affordable education (including traditional schools and universities but also via other means, e.g. self-teaching via online resources). These are two competing goals and often people only focus on the one to the exclusion of the other, but they are both important.
This hasn’t been true for years, decades even
The only way to pay for a large and generous welfare state is to educate the most capable to the highest level of ability. The tech industry was built by highly ambitious, competitive, risk-taking individuals.
"California collected almost $1 billion in personal income tax revenue from Palo Alto’s 94301 zip code in 2016. That was the most of any zip code in the state, according to a new LA Times analysis, which found that California’s top 1 percent of filers paid nearly 46 percent of income tax for that same year. "
https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101867426/californias-top-1-p....
Two, you don't label it as fair, and you recognize the disadvantages that exist and start talking about solutions.
I also don't see the problem with students from poor families simply going to community college for a couple years then transferring to a state school. It's far cheaper and the curriculum is largely the same for most undergraduate courses.
The major problem that progressive don't want to recognize is the role of culture and family structure, e.g. lower class Blacks and Whites who view education negatively, and who tend to be raised by single mothers. Asians generally don't have this problem and have the highest SAT scores even when you control for family income.
However they do offer a "Landscape" which provides similar details and many admissions programs use that to do something like what you're describing.
But that certainly isn't scalable. I'd argue the SAT is one of the most fair things we have at scale.
It's true that the SAT used to be biased (for example the word problems would use the word regatta which a wealthy east coast teen would know but a poor west coast teen would not) but from what I've seen they've done a good job removing that bias (as shown by this paper).
Admissions officers could then watch the recording, or rely on the automated scoring that the AI platform spits out.
Not everyone performs well on interviews, and I imagine performance would vary even more on interviews where you know your "interviewer" is an AI. But it could be really interesting, and a way to achieve the type of personalization and scale that you allude to.
For example in 2022, 63% of black children are born in single parent homes vs 16% of asian children. Having two parents around is an advantage in the doubling of resources.
What policy actions would you recommend to change what outcome?
https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/107-children-in-sing...
But also a good SAT for (those not naturally brilliant = most of us) also a positive indication of the student work ethic (to study for the test).
The problem I believe with the disadvantged students argument, which I believe to be a very real problem - is that lowering the standards wrt the test scores - is just a bad solution to a real problem.
Poor students do sit at a disadvantage - but the fix is much more difficult and complicated, and involves that child's entire life experience until they become 17 or 18 y/old. No one has a handle on how to fix it.
I get the feeling smart + hard work will come back into fashion when it comes to academic opportunities.
IIRC most colleges correlate incoming and outgoing grades for specific high schools - so that a 3.0 average at a highly competitive high school (think Stuyvesant or Thomas Jefferson) is a better indicator of success than a 4.0 at a poor performing school - the SAT is very helpful to add context to a GPA for a students applying from schools where colleges don’t already have a sense for the HS program’s rigor.
I came to appreciate my high school education when I attended a highly selective university and found my grades going up from high school without actually doing any more work while seeing class valedictorians (I barely scraped by with a cum laude) from other high schools really struggling.
One of the most interesting studies, not specifically focused on "success" / GPA, but on "life-satisfaction" comes from a longitudinal study "Project Talent"[1]. The key correlation to "life-satisfaction"/happiness is how many questions a person _attempts_ to answer on an otherwise un-finishable exam.
> IMO the thing that tests do not sample is persistance
Some companies used to do this. Around 1900, if you went to work for a major US steel company, you started out shoveling coal. Even if you were destined for management. Japan Air Lines pilot training for new pilots involves a stage where they do grunt jobs in maintenance such as checking incoming part serial numbers.
> No, it's not hard to test for.
> ...the testing for that is insane.
I imagine if you told people "we are not testing for correctness, just number of problems solved" then you would skew this test.
However when the tests were administered in the longitudinal study, the researchers didn't know which metrics would be important so they just put a lot of problems on it.
Over four years, I added 350 SAT (1200-1550) points and 5 ACT points (30-35), but it seems pretty likely to me that it wasn't the direct work ("persistence") that made the difference as much as the generic four more years of schooling and general maturity.
If one sets a goal to achieve & takes many tries at it, it is similar but not the same as "heres a bunch of questions, answer as many as possible and some correlations in the answers might be more important than others".
I think if you want to predict success there are two key factors: 1. Test takers must have weak feedback on their results 2. Test takers must be told that there is not uniformity in the importance of specific questions & some may be worth more than others. The test must be long enough that no one is willing to sit for the entire duration, and test takers should not be given an end-time or instruction on how to take the test.
Why? #1 mimics the weak feedback in real-life scenarios, if someone doesn't find you likeable for some unknown reason ... you'll probably see less of them.
#2 gets at you may never really know whats key to your success & hopefully by trying you get "lucky".
Sure, taking it a few times meant I knew what it felt like to take it. I knew what the books were like and how the proctors would act. I knew what could go wrong and what kinds of distractions I should be ready for.
That's why I think I only actually got better at the same rate that I would have if I weren't taking the tests.
A carefully crafted test-taking strategy is an optimization that seeks to maximize the score. Scoring on the aforementioned test basically wasn't correlated with future outcomes in a significant way, ie it could contribute but isn't a major, main or significant factor in determining how happy or successful people who took it came out.
Retaking tests has these problems, in that people adapt to optimize the result. For example if you told people the result of this test before taking it, I would say you would end up with a lot more people "answering" in the fastest way possible all of the questions. This would destroy the effect measured, in the same way that telling people tests will be ranked by scores erodes the metric.
"Retaking" misses the implementation of this test, it is more akin to "I'm going to keep giving you problems as long as you are willing to sit here" kind of thing.
Additionally this is the main correlation of the study. I doubt if researchers had in mind that the number of questions answered would be significant. If you told students "we are testing for number of questions answered" obv would distort the results.
Obviously this is a proxy for socioeconomic status, and people higher on that ladder will have better support structures to do better in school.
This is begging the question as socioeconomic status is the primary indicator of educational attainment in our country today.
They aren't measuring potential, but the persons ability and advantages. Just as buying more TVs won't improve your students performance.
> Importantly, the relationship between first-year college GPA and SAT/ACT scores is likewise quite similar across neighborhood income and other demographic subgroups at Dartmouth. By contrast, Chetty, Deming, and Friedman (2023) show that certain non-test score inputs in the admissions process, such as guidance counselor recommendations, do not predict college performance even though they do advantage more-advantaged applicants at IvyPlus institutions, increasing their admissions chance
The question that hard to answer is did those lower performance groups still learn, and what was the delta on where they started.
Private tutoring, existing life skills, access to money to free up studying time etc...
A student that has to work through school or has to help with the career of a family member has to sometimes sacrifice GPA for life's reality.
Obviously GPA is important for social ladder climbing. But this is part of the reason social mobility is the US is far lower than many other countries.
A B or C+ student is still learning and allowing for a path for those in the lowe 'casts' is how we grow economically.
This isn't a zero sum game. Eugenics based policies have hurt our competitiveness.
This is also why the SAT was adopted by Harvard in 1934. Prior to that, most students attending Harvard came from private New England boarding schools that could only be afforded by the upper class. They saw an opportunity to diversify the student body by testing the general public and admitting those that scored highest. As an added benefit, the SAT was much easier to grade than previous essay-based admissions standards, and so it reduced cost for the University.
So their efforts didn't work.
Add that to the zip code correlation that is the strongest indicator of SAT scores and it does matter.
Students without parents that are college graduates are also at a disadvantage no matter what their potential is.
It is one of the barriers to social mobility.
It is possible both for SAT scores to predict a person's potential to contribute in cognitively demanding fields AND for there to be a strong correlation between SAT score and parental income/zip code/etc. In fact, this is true even of a theoretically perfect measure that can somehow peer into the future of every prospective student were they to be admitted.
Is there some reason you expect that the children of people who did not go to college will have the same level of potential as those born to college graduates? Would this hold true of the children of professors, or Nobel winners? Is there any place for 'nature' in your worldview, or is it purely 'nurture'?
If I flip your numbers around, it actually sounds pretty good: a full quarter of the alumni come from the bottom 80% of zip codes!
But note that teams built from cognitively diverse members are far more productive while homogeneous teams dramatically underperform.
https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-the...
(Yes, it takes time and commitment but it's mostly not the case that paying for test prep courses automatically translates into higher scores.)
And yes, money helps a lot to brute force what material works for a kid and get motivated teachers. It's not a magic bullet, but it's a lot better than no bullet.
Education is free and freely available.
"Maximize your score with free Official Digital SAT® Prep"
You should probably get that checked out.
In today’s educational environment in America, students are rewarded heavily for belonging to an upper class, they are made to donate volunteer hours, join a sport team or a social club, participate in extracurricular activities, do homework (hopefully in a peaceful home setting with helpful parents and/or tutors), and then master the niche skill of pen and paper test taking. The SATs at the very least allow some students to skip all but last one, and have some chance of getting a decent education.
Ideally the systemic barriers to proper education should be dismantled. Remove this volunteer hour, move sports and social activities outside of the school system, remove homework, provide tutors to everyone that needs one, stop relying on pen and paper tests as the primary method of evaluation, etc. With all these systemic barriers removed, you can be sure that the SAT will have a diminished value.
Besides, SAT and ACT are really simple tests. If one gets 1600 for SAT, it does not mean this person will excel in academics, but if one gets 800 for SAT, well, this person statistically is not smart enough to achieve academic excellence. Of course, this person can be smart in many other ways.
That "all" is doing a heck of a lot of work, to the point of being indistinguishable from satire!
A lot of SAT success happens because of families who can afford to train and hire tutors specifically for preparation.
I'm beginning to think a lot of the people commenting on these things have this weird concept of these schools admitting poor kids from the sticks and asian kids from Chinatowns with no resume items except good grades and test scores....it's true they have much lower standards for them, but they still need to have a decently "pointy" resume to get in.
The only way Dartmouth can fix it's "equity" problems is by shutting down for good.
FYI the middle 50 is 1480 to 1560 for the class of 2028: https://www.crimsoneducation.org/us/blog/dartmouth-acceptanc...
I know a handful of people that got into Dartmouth and equivalent Ivies, none had an SAT score that low and this is from middle class high schools in the surburban south, not even the rich public schools, selective magnet schools, or prep schools.
I remember a time when CUNY schools would accept nearly everyone but had more Nobel Laureates than all of China even today. Perhaps this is a better model.
TIL. I only knew the other definition, "the quality of being religious or reverent".
Why is every parameter of admissions open to change despite tradition, except that one?
I can't imagine theres a dearth of physical space or qualified educators near any university. The fact that they are not growing to accommodate the demand has always boggled my mind...
Germany might be a better model where barebones education is easily accessible. They leave much more up to students: your homework might not be looked at and your grade depends solely on a final exam. No student centers or leafy campuses either.
The glut of un/under employed PHds suggest that the limited faculty is an artificial limit. Schools could easily hire more faculty and expand their undergrad programs if they wanted to.
They see their half percent acceptance rate as something that makes them special.
There's no shortage of people who can teach, there is only a shortage of a willingness to pay them to do so.
The problem is that the university departments are less willing to hire the faculty that they once did, and that largely comes down to university administrations having decided that paying for anything non-STEM (and non-sports, I guess) isn't worth it anymore.
The demand / revenue side might be another obstacle, especially if the easy money environment for school loans evaporates
Sounds like a community college.
That might be a concern for Dartmouth and the Ivys. But for US state schools, not so much. And those generally provide a very high value:cost product.
Also means that the "just increase the spots" already happened as well, there is no lack of spots today, just a lack of prestigious spots. But not everyone can get into prestigious positions, by definition prestigious has to be something special and not for everyone.
Sort of.
Sure, the school itself is huge, but often times that means that worthless majors[1] like Psychology and English are open, but more valuable majors are often limited.
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1. Worthless in the sense of earning potential with a Bachelors
Dartmouth today has 6,700 students of all races, genders, religions.
Enrollment numbers can and do change, but it is much harder and slower to change something that is physically and resource constrained than it is to change policy.
And where that is a goal, there is clearly a point where you have to draw a line based on capacity, student:teacher ratios, etc.
Trade schools make a lot more sense for most. Get a good job and you can self study from a position of safety...
What did you have in mind?
However, if you go spend some time teaching at a community college, I don't think you'll walk away with the idea that somehow getting all those students pushed into a university would improve things for the community college students or for the ability to educate kids at the university.
Increasing enrollment might be beneficial, but past a certain point it is going to be detrimental to education.
It’s an objective truth that there are more elite students than there are positions in these schools. It’s also true that schools have absolutely exploded in administration size. They just haven’t hired more teachers.
Schools can’t double capcity overnight. But they currently aren’t making student body growth a goal. They prefer to keep it small and be extremely selective and exclusionary.
The flip side to this is that undergrad doesn’t matter. These elite schools don’t actually provide an elite education. They merely serve as a talent filter.
Maybe controversial but I really believe this lowers overall standards. You just can't find enough faculty to meet the high standards.
Look what happened when tech blew up - they hired like crazy. I'd argue the overall level of programming skill went down.
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Many/most PhDs who want a faculty position will never be able to get one because the availability of jobs is so low. There's really no shortage of potential faculty members.