The Reality of College Admissions in the US
and its implications for standardized testing and other things
Some of you might remember my long post a while back on the actual value (not much) of the SAT (and, by extension, standardized testing in general). Briefly, I argued in that piece that the only meaningful function of the SAT in admissions is to elevate a statistical handful of people from the working class to the 1%-ish. Indeed, the scope of the impact of the SAT really extends to literally a couple of hundred elite colleges, and it contributes at best nothing to any meaningful struggle against poverty or inequality. Instead, I would say, it contributes to the illusion that any student from any background can live the American Dream (TM) of using their smarts to get into a position to run a Fortune 500 company or even to run the country, and that it thereby “levels the playing field” enough that anyone remaining in poverty is there because they deserve to be. It’s essentially the intellectual equivalent of the idea high schoolers get that if they work hard, they will play professional sports and make a lot of money. No, they won’t. Almost none of them. Literally.
I was recently reading Ryan Burge’s excellent Graphs About Religion newsletter on free speech attitudes on college campuses. There he makes the following observation:
Here’s a great statistic from the Pew Research Center - they looked at 1,364 four-year colleges and universities. How many of them had an admissions rate of less than 10%? The answer was 1.2%. Just 3% of them had an admissions rate that was below 30%. In other words, the average college looks a lot more like Eastern Illinois University than Stanford. My students are a whole lot of first generation kids. Many of them grew up within a couple of hours drive of Charleston, Illinois. Very few of them are activists of any kind. They keep their heads down, focus on their studies, drink a few beers, and get a pretty affordable degree.
Add to this the fact that requiring the SAT has been trending downward for literally decades (in 24-25, more than 80% of schools do not require applicants to submit a score), and we have a picture of the academy at odds with perceptions everywhere.
This picture tells us a lot about the realities of academia, much of it contrary to what many people, both academics and, um, civilians? Lay people? think. Even academics like me, who are working to remain aware that we live in a bubble, find it difficult to process just how small that bubble really is. The bubble is particularly small at the elite colleges for which the SAT really matters.The overwhelming majority of students in the US are enrolled at colleges that are less selective than, as in Lake Wobegon, everyone wants to think about themselves; similarly, the faculty. Few people pursue a Ph.D. with the goal of mediocrity. We think we are smart (many times, of course, we are just plain wrong, but that is beside my point), and we love what we’re studying so much that we give literal years of our lives to it with very little in the way of compensation, often amassing debt that can be crippling even knowing that the job market has only been getting steadily worse and colleges more precarious.
Most teaching jobs, despite the Dead Poets Society-fueled dreams of many would-be academics for a life of the mind with students dedicated to learning, are jobs teaching students who are there because (a) it’s the school they could get into, (b) it’s the school they can (or are willing to) afford, and (c) it’s supposed to lead to greater economic security, which the evidence is still that it does, even with humanities degrees. This means, among other things, that you have many frustrated academics who understandably got into this business not just because they wanted to teach but because they think that what they teach actually matters, somehow. It also means that students and parents have to be convinced that what many of their profs are teaching actually matters, somehow. This is part of how I came to the conclusion, after my first semester of teaching at William Paterson University (a tremendous experience for me as a teacher), that my first job, my primary objective, in some cases the only thing I will achieve, as a philosophy teacher is to send students away at the end of the semester with the belief that the course was actually worth taking, not because it improved their job prospects but because it showed that — and how — thinking can be interesting and also useful for things that won’t necessarily make you money. That still seems like a worthy goal for me and for them, and an SAT, it should be said, doesn’t really have much to do with it, except insofar as I might approach students with different backgrounds differently in order to engage them: and students who are already interested are of course super fun to teach, and they are there. FERPA, though, means I start every semester with a totally blank slate for all my students, so their SAT score doesn’t even help me think about what they can and can’t do or know and don’t know or want and don’t want out of my class.
The other point I would like to make in connection with this I also made in that SAT piece: the policies and practices of the elite institutions have much, much less influence on practices elsewhere than most people tend to think. Sure, as my observations above about dashed dreams might suggest, you’re sure to have some Ivy-envy in aspects of curriculum design, course offerings, and so on. But all in all, the student populations are so different in so many important ways, and the institutions so different (financially, among other things), that following the lead of Yale or even of, say, an Oberlin or Bates, would make zero sense for these schools. The kinds and amount of resources available, the campus cultures, and so on, are barely comparable.
When I was in grad school at Yale, the graduate student union held a grade strike. The story of that strike is its own whole thing, and it occurs to me that I wish one of my friends would write about it, but I want to talk about one episode from that effort. Full disclosure: I did not have a TA job that semester, as I had a part-time gig elsewhere, so I was not actually on strike myself. Many of us went to the annual meeting of the American Historical Association to publicize and defend our efforts, having conversations and handing out leaflets trying to rally support and head off the administration trying to do the same. A session was hastily put together to discuss the situation. The room was packed. I am not good at estimating these things, but it was at least two hundred people, maybe as many as three hundred or more. If you think again about how few elite institutions there are in this country, you will quickly realize that the overwhelming majority of the faculty in that room were teaching at schools that are very different from Yale. Before the session, I was listening to some people in the back of the room talking, and I heard a lot about the ungrateful graduate students who don’t know how good they’ve got it. When the session started, a famous Yale historian (who went on, as I recall, to a dean job, but maybe I’m making that up) got up to address the room. She complained about having all the work the TAs were supposed to do being dumped on her at the end of the semester. She said, and I am not making this up: “Imagine having to grade all your own papers.” Everyone I know, by the way, grades all their own papers. I have never in my entire life worked at a school where I had TAs to lead sections and grade papers. And I never will.
Of course, she regretted it instantly, you could see it on her face, but the words were already out there, and the room had already turned on her irretrievably. Some of my friends actually felt bad for her, and I understand why, but the truth is that she had shown us all in a very concrete way how different her life is from most people’s. The faculty in the room who had been inclined to be frustrated at a privileged group of grad students suddenly saw very clearly how they were closer to the grad students than they were to the faculty at a place like Yale.
And this is my point. It’s my point about SATs and admissions and curriculum and athletics. There are some very bad things about this, but there are also good things. The main thing I would like to say is that if there is anything that holds these institutions together recognizably in a single category, it shouldn’t be tests or admissions standards or grade non-inflation, or whatever. It should be that, up and down the educational status hierarchy, all of us at every institution do our best to give our students genuine educations, to help them (whatever they come in with, a lot or a little BOTH) in the transition to living adult lives, to find out about the world and other people who aren’t themselves and also, by doing that earnestly and with integrity, to learn about themselves. They can not just learn who they are; they can make previously-unavailable choices about who they are, who they might become, how to do that, what they want to do in their lives, and how their lives might fit meaningfully into a world that isn’t all about them.
The institutions often do not support very well the mission I have just outlined, and many times we have to kind of work against the institutions in trying to achieve it. But if enough of us could get, not even on the same page, but in the same book, about what we want from education, we might make it better.