Ever since I was first interviewed for a news story and especially when I was interviewed for the documentaries I was in (both the Test and The Art of Thinking and Netflix’s Operation Varsity Blues). I’ve been fascinated by what’s left out. I asked both producers of the documentaries if they would release the uncut footage but alas that’s not something they do. I feel that the cutting room floor and editing choices are as interesting as the final product.
So in the spirit of practicing what I preach, I’ll periodically post my cutting room floor. Anything labeled “cutting room floor” will be incomplete thoughts, mildly edited text, unfact checked data points, etc. Do with it as you see fit.
I recently published an oped in Inside higher Ed titled The misguided war on test optional I also worked on a report for FairTest titled Why College Admissions Should Remain Test Optional/Test Free. This is some of the content that were in drafts and snippets that didn’t make any of the published pieces:
Let’s start with my notes on the article. I usually just hateread on the fly on Xwitter but, there was just so so much in this article that twitter couldn’t capture it all, so I marked up a PDF instead:
This image from 2016 at harvard sort of says a lot about that place. I wanted it to be used with my story but its a little obscure.
Crowd gathers at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association at the 365th Harvard University Commencement Afternoon Exercises on May 26, 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.PAUL MAROTTA/GETTY IMAGES
Speaking of elitism have you seen this tiktok?
Depaul, seven Oregon colleges, University of Chicago, Rhodes, James Madison and WPI all provide their rationale for their policy and diversity is one factor among many. Data from several public colleges also provided evidence that testing provided them little value. A report from University of Tennessee concluded, in part, that the “ACT only adds predictive value in the top few HSGPA deciles, which is unhelpful in admissions decisions.”
A Focus Elitism
Far too many conversations about higher education and success begin from the premise that Harvard is college. That a higher GPA means a smarter student. That a better test score means more qualified. That richer is more capable. And from that vantage point, the only things that make a college worthwhile is its ability to approximate the practices and outcomes of Harvard.
This perspective can be seen in the construction of the rankings, the obsession with exclusion, the focus on presenting competition as qualification, and the use of metrics as merit. The viewpoint demonstrates how many of those who have achieved success view the world as the Hunger Games and their accomplishments as demonstration of their deservingness. And just as in Panem, the members of District 1 pretend their wealth has no influence on the outcomes. They ignore the lessons of history and the success of the robber barons who funded many of the earliest colleges in order to provide for their offspring a veneer of philanthropy.
The New York Times reinforces this perspective by constantly focusing on a small set of highly rejective colleges. In fact, over a 2 year period, almost 75% of headlines on stories by the main Times education reporter mentioned one of 4 colleges. It’s unreasonable to believe that in two years that nothing newsworthy occurred at other colleges. Even historically, the paper shows a particular hyperfocus in its reporting: the word Harvard appeared 6 times more often than Darthmouth and 18 times more often than Baruch in a search I conducted on the Times Machine.
Discussing these universities in and of themselves is not problematic, especially if it advances the discourse around education, but this article doesn’t do that. The ostensible basis of the article is research by economist Raj Chetty and his Opportunity Insights center. While the research offers some interesting insights and questions about the connections between income and admissions, it is by no means a good representation of “college.” The researchers themselves stated, in a footnote, “We caution that our analysis applies only to Ivy-Plus applicants and the predictive power of test scores and GPAs may differ in other settings.”
The underlying research on which the article is based makes the same error. In analyzing career opportunities, the research defines success of Ivy Plus institutions as increasing their graduate probability of earning top 1% income, getting into Ivy Plus graduate schools, and being employed by firms that hire a large percent of Ivy Plus graduates. These definitions of success seem particularly narrow, elitists, and circular. Further it ignores entirely the nepobaby effect and the research that shows the role of parental wealth and influence on educational, career outcomes, and financial outcomes.
A Salve For Administrative Incompetence
As justification for requiring tests, test publishers and advocates love to recite the refrain that admissions offices are unable to distinguish between students without scores. They raise the specter of grade inflation. They mention students struggling. They cite students dropping out.
But to make this case they have to ignore data and define struggle in bizarre ways.
Getting a C once in a college career (this was in the Opportunity Insights definition of poor performance). Ending the first year of college with a GPA of 3.4. Graduating 96% of enrollees. Employment at companies that don’t draw at least 25% of employees from Ivy Plus colleges.
These are the measures that test advocates often use to define success and that they claim requiring tests will somehow improve.
The admissions officers that Leonhardt mentions worrying about students dropping out are at institutions that have pre, post, and during Covid averaged around 4% drop out rate.
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What never seems to be discussed is whether those that do drop out do so because of cost, personal circumstances, mental health, interpersonal violence or some other cause. It’s also not hard to imagine that the students who have the lowest test scores are also those that institutions like Harvard and Dartmouth require to clear the dorms or take jobs in order to keep financial aid. If they can’t afford tutors, have to take a part-time job, or clean up after classmates in order to go to school, it’s likely not the SAT score that leads to lower GPAs or dropping out. Consider the Operation Varsity Blues cheaters, not a single one of them dropped out of school despite having cheated to get undeservedly high test scores. The research rarely indicates test scores or even academic challenges as the primary or sole reason for dropping out, but that justification is consistently offered as a risk mitigation strategy.
The presumption that admissions offices cannot identify financial, academic, and family risk factors without scores is suspect. Any attempt to predict complex human behavior and interactions (which is what college attendance is) with perfect accuracy seems destined to fail. Perhaps what scores provide is a shield to hide behind.
A convenient justification for requiring a mildly helpful metric is to inflate the importance and role of that metric. Leonhardt does this.
Harvard isn’t College
The research paper that Leonhardt finds so convincing is based on 33 schools, ⅔ of which are private and admit fewer than 1 in 3 applicants. These institutions are so far from the typical college that drawing conclusions about college from a study of these schools has as much logical validity as drawing conclusions about colleges by looking at Lancaster Bible College, LA Film School, and Berklee College of Music.
Elon, conservatives and racism
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-endorses-tweet-saying-students-at-black-colle-1851156533
Many of those who argue against changes in admissions practices also argue against DEI, CRT, gender studies, and any other shift in priorities that moves institutions away from the traditional profile of higher education. That traditional profile being wealthy White Protestant landowners using inherited wealth and status.
These arguments start by defining “excellence” in terms of the accomplishment of a very narrow set of outcomes and circular reasoning. Selectivity. Reputation. Wealth. Elitism.
The arguments presented follow common themes presented by testing advocates that test optional policies remove an objective measure, lower academic standards, and make it more difficult to predict which students will be successful. The article implicitly questions the motives and understanding of data by admissions offices that choose not to require testing. These arguments highlight how ingrained the belief in testing has become in some parts of society and how misunderstood the history and process of college admission are.
Any argument that begins with testing policies since the pandemic are ignoring decades of education history. Standardized admission testing didn’t become part of the admission landscape until 1926. As late as 1960 only about 21% of the colleges in the country required the SAT. And while the use of testing continued to expand, policies on whether to require tests and which tests have varied at individual institutions and in the industry as a whole. It wasn’t until almost 2010, that all colleges considered the SAT and ACT equally.
Higher education is diverse with a long history of evolving and changing, where once there was one college there are now more than 2,300 different institutions that grant bachelor’s degrees. Of these, all but about 300 admit more students than they reject. There are fewer than 70 that reject 75% or more of their applicants. Juilliard is one of these, as is MIT, the US Air Force Academy, and College of the Ozarks. These institutions vary in degrees awarded, curriculum, size, mission, prestige, national draw, religious affiliation, cost, et cetera. The assumption that there would be consistent requirements across such a range of institutions is not logical or reasonable.
Leonhardt goes further and uses research on 33 colleges to justify his claim that colleges remaining test optional is a mistake.
This perspective can be seen in the construction of the rankings, the obsession with exclusion, the focus on presenting competition as qualification, and the use of metrics as merit. The viewpoint demonstrates how many of those who have achieved success view the world as the Hunger Games and their accomplishments as demonstration of their deservingness. And just as in Panem, the members of District 1 pretend their wealth has no influence on the outcomes. They ignore the lessons of history and the success of the robber barons who funded many of the earliest colleges in order to provide for their offspring a veneer of philanthropy.
The author of Teach Like a Champion decided to jump into the test optional debate with one of the dumbest takes yet.
1. kudos to dartmouth for releasing data 2. they did the same analysis that Opp Insights did, which defines these schools as a disadvantaged: Poly Prep Country Day ($67K) Berkeley Carroll (57k) Mary McDowell Friends (80k) Providence Country Day (25k) Beverly Hills High
I guess this article explains a lot https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/02/is-the-new-york-times-newsroom-just-a-bunch-of-ivy-leaguers-kinda-sorta/
The circular reasonging and self aggrandizement of the scions of robber barrons is evident in the NYT, Opp Insights, their feeder schools and the companies they feed into.
Its a story as old as time: Rich kid get put into expensive private school, expensive private school curates a set of experiences and opportunities that private elitist colleges value, highly rejective college admits rich kid, HRC curates a series of experiences and opportunities (including having an Office of Prestigious Scholarships in order to help secure Rhodes Fellowships) to polish the the rich kid for elitist/exploitive career opportunities like McKenzie, and at every step along the way rich nepo baby is told that its his hard work that has created all these outcomes.
Bellowings 