There’s been a great deal of talk lately about universities’ making SAT scores optional for admission or dropping them entirely; today, Kimberly Swygert pointed to this article in the WSJ. Many of the articles about this topic have been of the moaning variety, largely because the authors are making unwarranted assumptions.
Let’s get a couple of things out of the way first, points I will expand in a moment. Dropping SAT scores as an admission requirement is distinctly different from lowering standards. Dropping the SAT is not in any way comparable to “education gaps” in the public schools. Finally, it makes no difference how well the SAT predicts student performance at the university.
The dirty little not-so-secret secret on campus is this: Underprepared students drop out, and do not complete degrees. I call it a not-so-secret secret because you almost never see reference to this anywhere but on campus. Whenever you see an article about “diversity among the student body,” it is always about admissions.
This is because, unlike the public schools, universities are not responsible for failed students: Going to college is your chance, and if you blow it, you blow it. I dare say that on every university campus every year, there are a couple of moaning, liberal, hand-wringing articles or editorials in the campus paper about retaining minority students. Administrations set up task forces, schools and colleges and departments create committees, all to study retention, but these task forces and committees don’t accomplish any policy and affects retention, for the one, painfully obvious reason: Students drop out because they are overwhelmed, and they are overwhelmed because they are not prepared for university work.
But in “The College Paradox: Not Everyone Gains By Higher Education,” an article about egalitarian v. tracking in education and not SAT scores, Steve Sailer puts his finger on the dirty little secret secret:
The prestige of Harvard and the other apex predators at the lofty pinnacle of the American educational pyramid means that the vast K-12 bottom has been infected with Harvard’s values (such as abstraction and abstruseness) and rhetoric (equality uber alles)…but not, alas, Harvard’s brains. Most of the K-12 educators, much less their students, aren’t smart enough to get the joke. They don’t understand that the IQ elitists of America are pulling the wool over their eyes when they rattle on about their purported liberal beliefs about how everybody should go to college.
They don’t understand it’s all a big pyramid scheme. The Harvard professors’ graduate students become the UCLA professors whose graduate students become the Cal State LA professors whose students become the schoolteachers who browbeat their more gullible pupils into believing that everybody should go to college, no matter how obvious a waste of money and time it will turn out to be.
Students with below average IQs [or underprepared students, regardless of IQ] are just the cannon fodder that keeps the system churning along for the professors.
Exactly. Dropping the SAT as an admission requirement is a win-win situation for the university. It’s a win-win because the university wins on two fronts: PR (and latte liberal feel-good-ism), and financial.
On the PR front, spewing nonsense about “diversity” accomplishes two things. First, it gives everybody something to feel guilty about, and as we all know, guilt is the primary motivator for upper middle class over-educated latte liberal academics, and as with any other source of guilt, it gives them something to “study” in those pointless task forces and committees. Everybody can pat himself on the back for “making a difference.” Second, it brings in lots of contributions from external sources, one of them guilty, wealthy latte liberal alumni, who give their alma mater more money because they are “making a difference,” and of course, because the contribution itself is “making a difference.” An extremely liberal alumnus of one Ivy League university who started a software company and did very well for himself donated several million dollars to his alma mater for setting up a program to study how the university could increase “diversity” in the student body (no names, of donors or universities).
The university also wins financially. Students are revenue. The more students a university enrolls, the more revenue the university rakes in — and the university always gets their revenue. Yes, most of the underprepared students will drop out, but the university has a freshman class every year. As Sailer points out, although talking about a completely different topic, it’s a pyramid scheme. It doesn’t matter that most of the underprepared freshmen won’t make it through the year (they will pay for the year, or somebody will), because there will be more the next year.
Sailer again:
Rather than follow CCNY’s disastrous route [open admissions], they made the cheaper choice of paying off minorities with affirmative action. Simultaneously, and paradoxically, they became even more IQ elitist in choosing mainstream applicants.
And it is exactly the same with dropping SATs from admissions, or almost the same. SATs required or not, the students who have the knowledge and are prepared will still apply. It doesn’t matter that a handful of qualified students will not be accepted in order to make room for “more diverse” students, because elite universities, with few exceptions, don’t make their reputations or most of their income from undergraduate education, but from graduate education and research.
And universities can always expand the number of undergraduate students they accept.
I’m not saying that universities don’t care about the quality of their undergraduate programs, and I’m certainly not saying that undergraduate education isn’t a big cash cow. But the undergraduate program takes a back seat to graduate programs, and here’s why.
Why do people desperately want to get into Harvard, say, or MIT? Because they’re top universities. And why are they top universities?
Not because of the quality of their undergraduate programs, but because of their reputations. And they have those reputations precisely because of their faculty who are big names in their fields and win things like Nobel Prizes and the PhD students they turn out who go on to become big names in their fields and win things like Nobel Prizes (as as anyone who has ever been in a PhD program knows, much of the time, the research that got Professor Smith that Nobel Prize is done at least in part by his PhD students).
“Diversity” is an investment. So are tools to achieve it (which never do), like affirmative action and dropping the SAT as an admissions requirement.
I call this a dirty little secret secret because from the talk about universities in the edusphere, you would think that all universities do is educate undergraduates. No doubt this is because most of the edusphere is made up of public school teachers and parents. But universities aren’t primarily in the business of educating undergraduates. I wouldn’t call it a sideline, but it does fall beneath research and graduate education, for good reason.
Universities don’t have to downgrade their education standards for these students, because they drop out, and there will be a whole new crop next year. Universities throw them bones, like African-American Studies Programs, Women’s Studies Programs, etc., but at many universities, these programs don’t offer bachelors’ degrees, and even if they do, there’s very little that student can do with that degree if he graduates. Standards are being downgraded in some fields, certainly, but that has absolutely nothing to do with “a more diverse campus,” and is unrelated to this discussion.
Sailer is correct. The underprepared students are cannon fodder for the pyramid scheme. They drop out, and the university gets more money.
As a final note, I suppose this sounds cynical, but it’s not meant to be cynical. It’s realistic. Universities, unlike the public schools, are businesses. Dropping the SAT is good business. Dropping the GRE (or GMAT, etc.) certainly is not, and that’s why you see very few universities lowering admission standards for graduate school (Ann Althouse last month referred to a university law school that’s dropping the LSAT, but I gathered from the discussion that it is not in any way prestigious, and seems to be trying to make a name for itself solely by scoring political points).
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