The Misguided Defense of the SAT
On elite colleges and the goals of higher education
David Leonhardt’s recent NYT essay (a bit less recent now than it was when I started this), “The Misguided War on the SAT,” has been making the rounds. I wasn’t going to do anything with it until I started seeing it linked in places where I expect people to be discriminating (not to say discriminatory). And so I want to say a few things about why, in my view, the SAT is a problem — or more accurately, a symptom of the larger social problems the SAT is itself meant somehow to rectify.
Leonhardt tells us that SAT scores are more predictive of college grades ( = “college success”) than anything else we have, and especially better than high school grades. The focus of his argument, and so of the evidence and other support he marshals, is on “dozens of elite colleges,” and even more specifically on what are known as “Ivy Plus colleges (the eight in the Ivy League, along with Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and the University of Chicago).” Leonhardt picks up on what seems to me like a recent trend of emphasizing the training of “America’s future leaders” as a reason to pay such close attention to Ivy Plus colleges and their admissions policies. I think those policies don’t really mean anything for the policies of other institutions, many of which right now are just trying to survive, than people wringing their hands about Harvard classes on Taylor Swift and holistic admissions say they are (Leonhardt notes that the national average acceptance rate is 70%, so most schools are not modeling themselves on Ivies simply because they can’t, even if they wanted to). But that isn’t Leonhardt’s argument here. Instead he says we should pay attention to elite access to power granted by elite institutions because it’s a way of breaking the glass ceiling and diversifying elite power structures to make the leaders of tomorrow.
The argument for the SAT and specifically its role in access to elite institutions, as I understand it, is essentially two-pronged. First, it’s a mechanism for social mobility, and second, it’s a feeder for the change-makers of tomorrow. I’ll address these in reverse order.
Leonhardt is surely right that elite colleges “want to identify and educate the students most likely to excel. These students, in turn, can produce cutting-edge scientific research that will cure diseases and accelerate the world’s transition to clean energy. The students can found nonprofit groups and companies that benefit all of society.”
And, of course, I’m all for people reaching their potential and supporting people with opportunities and resources. But the idea that using the SAT to “diversify” the same old elite tables in the same old elite rooms is going to change the world doesn’t seem grounded in any evidence at all. Indeed, Olufemi Taiwo’s incisive recent book, Elite Capture, dissects precisely this notion — we don’t infiltrate the elites; the elites capture us. The proverbial “seat at the table” transforms the person sitting in it more thoroughly than the person transforms the table. A glance at the Opportunity Insights study (which Leonhardt uses) shows that most of the benefit of Ivy Plus schools over flagship public schools is in access to the stratosphere, while effects on average pay are negligible: “attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission.” Are all those elite kids working at “prestigious firms” changing the world? Why should we think they are? We shouldn’t if our current off-the-charts homelessness and increasing pace of global warming, for example, are any measure. I’d want to see some evidence — any evidence at all — that getting a more diverse 1% is actually going to benefit society in any really meaningful way. As Taiwo puts it, “it is the problem — the institutions and patterns of the status quo — that are offered up as the solution” (21).
Leonhardt continues: “The tests are not entirely objective, of course. Well-off students can pay for test prep classes and can pay to take the tests multiple times. Yet the evidence suggests that these advantages cause a very small part of the gaps.” The NAEP, he points out, shows similar gaps with no test prep for it, so the SAT and ACT gaps are, quoting Raj Chetty, “a symptom, not a cause, of inequality in the US.”
But, of course, I’d agree! It’s a symptom of problems that are not going to be remedied by the SAT or by diversifying admissions at elite institutions. Leonhardt argues that these “leaders” (I’m not being snarky; just saying it’s his term, not mine) go on, for example, to “found nonprofits that benefit society at large.” Never mind that one of the measures used in the study is students’ future ascent to “prestigious firms,” not “founded nonprofits” — and that’s even leaving aside the question of how useful the category “nonprofit” is when thinking about social benefits.
And, of course, this is exactly my objection to the SAT: academic achievement is a result of many factors, not just how smart you are or how hard you work. The real issue is our insistence on making education, both in pk12 and in higher ed, the engine of social mobility, which it can’t be and isn’t, and all the data tell us that people with more money graduate more, get into better schools, and benefit from those educational institutions more than people without. Maybe instead of trying to fix education so that it “works” in the sense of enabling social mobility, we could let education do other work that can’t be done in other places or at other times of life.
So, sure, I totally believe that the SAT is less obviously “biased” in the sense of actively keeping kids down than other things like even grades, never mind extracurricular opportunities and so forth (the most interesting thing to me in this part of the debate is that athletics also favors the wealthy, contrary to the mythology of the poor kids getting to go to college on their athletic scholarships).
“But,” Leonhardt argues, “the data suggests that testing critics have drawn the wrong battle lines. If test scores are used as one factor among others — and if colleges give applicants credit for having overcome adversity — the SAT and ACT can help create diverse classes of highly talented students.”
This sounds a lot like “holistic admissions,” which has become very problematic in light of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling. What non-merit factors are acceptable in college admissions, and how do we regulate that? But the larger question, in my view, is whether and why merit plays any role at all. But meritocracy as a foundational principle goes completely uninterrogated in Leonhardt’s analysis, instead being placed as its cornerstone: “Restoring the tests might also help address a different frustration that many Americans have with the admissions process at elite universities: that it has become too opaque and unconnected to merit.” Presumably he means merit not just in the sense of being smart, but of “having overcome adversity” — so merit here is really about moral desert. People who work hard and overcome deserve more. When they don’t get it, that’s a sign that something is wrong. When people who don’t merit get, and people who do merit don’t, we need to fix it.
This is really the heart of the matter, and the SAT is not merely a “symptom” of the problem of inequality in educational access or achievement; it’s a symptom of the problem of a meritocratic stratification of social and economic success. Why does anyone need to “deserve” an education any more than they should need to “deserve” food or a safe place to live and some basic dignity as a person?
What we should be striving for, if the SAT measures anything useful at all, is to provide the larger social framework within which everyone can get better at the useful things the SAT measures. The gaps in test scores are an indictment of an institutional structure that relies on education to fix social inequality when it’s demonstrably impossible — despite outlier success stories — for education to address systemic social and economic inequity. This is really a way of asking everyone to earn a life of basic dignity. If we didn’t have such a stratified society, we wouldn’t need education — or anything — to promote social mobility, but education is not going to fix social stratification on a society-wide scale, even with the use of the SAT. If you think it’s right and true that people who make it to the elite — the prestigious firms — deserve to succeed and people who don’t, don’t, then you’ll be fine with that. If you think “deserving” people make do make it to the elite, but we should make the system do so more reliably, perhaps with the help of the SAT, you are using identity politics to shore up the processes of elite capture, whether that’s what you mean to do or not, and you’re insisting that education is really a mechanism for sorting the worthy from the unworthy. But if you profess to believe that no one deserves to live a life of deprivation and desperation, you should be rethinking whether the SAT is really the thing to be fighting about in the first place.