“After the Covid pandemic made it difficult for high school students to take the SAT and ACT, dozens of selective colleges dropped their requirement that applicants do so,” wrote David Leonhardt in “The Misguided War on the SAT,” a recent NY Times article. “Colleges described the move as temporary, but nearly all have since stuck to a test-optional policy. It reflects a backlash against standardized tests that began long before the pandemic, and many people have hailed the change as a victory for equity in higher education.”
“Now, though, a growing number of experts and university administrators wonder whether the switch has been a mistake,” added Leonhardt. “Research has increasingly shown that standardized test scores contain real information, helping to predict college grades, chances of graduation and post-college success. Test scores are more reliable than high school grades, partly because of grade inflation in recent years.”
Leonhardt’s article is primarily based on two recent studies published by Opportunity Insights, a not-for-profit organization based at Harvard that conducts data-driven scientific research on how to improve upward mobility. Each of the studies analyzed the value of SAT and ACT standardized test scores in predicting academic success at the 12 so-called Ivy-Plus colleges, — the eight Ivy League colleges plus Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford.
While using different data and analytical methodologies, the overall conclusion of each of these studies was similar: standardized SAT and ACT scores are highly predictive of academic success at the Ivy-Plus colleges regardless of the students’ socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition, the second study also found that standardized SAT and ACT scores are highly predictive of post-college career success, such as attendance at top graduate schools, high earnings, and employment at prestigious firms. Let me discuss each of these studies.
The first study, “Standardized Test Scores and Academic Performance at Ivy-Plus Colleges,” was released in January of 2024 by John Friedman, Bruce Sacerdote, and Michele Tine. The accompanying technical appendix explains their overall methodology in great detail. Their relatively short paper summarizes the study’s three key findings.
Finding # 1. “What is the value of standardized test (SAT and ACT) scores in college admissions?” To answer this question, the authors analyzed the relationship between standardized test scores and high school grade point average (GPA) with academic success in college using admissions records and first-year college grades from students in Ivy-Plus colleges between 2017 and 2022, and concluded that: “Students with higher SAT/ACT scores are more likely to have higher college GPAs than their peers with lower scores.”
Finding #2. While higher SAT/ACT are good predictors of higher college GPAs, higher high school GPAs are not. Comparing students with the same grades in high school, the study found that students at the 100% percentile of test scores, — i.e., 1600 in SAT or 36 in ACT, — had a first-year college GPA 0.43 points higher that students at the 75% percentile of SAT/ACT scores, — a significant difference. On the other hand, students with a perfect high school GPA of 4.0 had a cumulative GPA in college that was only 0.1 points higher than a student with a 3.2 high school GPA. “High school GPA does a poor job of predicting academic success in college.”
Finding #3. Are higher SAT/ACT scores associated with higher college GPAs even when comparing students from different socioeconomic backgrounds? This is a very important question because standardized test scores would not be useful predictors of academic success if they were biased against students with access to fewer resources. To shed light on this question, the study compared the first-year college GPAs from students from less versus more advantaged high schools with similar SAT/ACT scores and found no evidence that students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds outperformed students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. “Students from different socioeconomic backgrounds who have comparable SAT/ACT scores receive similar grades in college.”
Based on these three findings, Friedman, Sacerdote, and Tine wrote that: “We conclude that standardized test scores may have more value for admissions processes than previously understood in the literature, especially for highly selective colleges.”
The second study, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges,” was published by Opportunity Insights in October of 2023 by Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman along with a set of presentation slides that explained their methodology.
“Leadership positions in the United States are held disproportionately by graduates of a small number of highly selective private colleges,” wrote the authors. “Less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges (the eight Ivy League colleges, Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford). Yet these twelve colleges account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century. Ivy-Plus colleges also enroll a disproportionate share of students from high-income families: students from families in the top 1% of the income distribution are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college than students with comparable SAT or ACT scores from the middle class.”
In their paper, Chetty, Deming, and Friedman aimed to answer two central questions. First, do these highly selective private colleges amplify the persistence of privilege across generations? And second, could these colleges diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices?
To analyze these two questions, the authors created an anonymized dataset covering 2.4 million students in the entering classes of 2010-2015 that linked together several sources of relevant information. These included pre-college data, including parental income, student’s high school grades and SET/ACT scores and other academic and non-academic credentials, as well as post-college outcomes including the students’ post-college earnings, employer, occupations, and graduate school attendance. The dataset included statistics from the 12 Ivy-Plus colleges, 12 other highly selective private colleges, including Cal-Tech, Northwestern, and CMU; and 9 highly selective public colleges like UC Berkeley, UT Austin, and Michigan.
Let me summarize the study’s key findings.
Do these highly selective private colleges amplify the persistence of privilege across generations?
- Attending an Ivy-Plus college 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 institution.
- Two-thirds of the high-income admissions advantage is driven by three key factors: legacy admissions, that is, preferences for children of alumni; non-academic ratings, which tend to be higher for students applying from affluent private high schools; and recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families.
- The three key admission factors that advantage children from high-income families are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes.
- Highly selective schools like the Ivy-Plus colleges perpetuate privilege across generations because they admit students from high-income families at substantially higher rates than students from lower-income families with comparable academic credentials.
Could these colleges diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices?
- SAT/ACT scores and academic ratings are highly predictive of post-college success.
- Understanding what aspects of the pipeline to college enrollment lead to the under-representation of children from low- and middle-income families and addressing the relevant barriers directly may be a more fruitful approach to expanding access.
- Revisiting the admissions advantages currently conferred to students from high-income families could increase socioeconomic diversity by an amount comparable to the impacts of race-based affirmative action on racial diversity.
- Despite substantial initiatives to increase socioeconomic diversity, the share of students from the top 1% vs. the middle class at highly selective private colleges in America has remained essentially unchanged over the past 20 years.
Based on these findings, Chetty, Deming, and Friedman wrote: “We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.”
Leonhardt’s article was published in early January. At the time MIT was the only one of the twelve Ivy-Plus colleges that had reinstated its test requirement, one of the few schools in the country to have done so. “During the pandemic, M.I.T. suspended its test requirement for two years,” wrote Leonhardt. “But after officials there studied the previous 15 years of admissions records, they found that students who had been accepted despite lower test scores were more likely to struggle or drop out.”
“Without test scores,” explained MIT’s Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill, “officers were left with two unappealing options. They would have to guess which students were likely to do well at M.I.T. — and almost certainly guess wrong sometimes, rejecting qualified applicants while admitting weaker ones. Or M.I.T. would need to reject more students from less advantaged high schools and admit more from the private schools and advantaged public schools that have a strong record of producing well-qualified students.”
In February of 2024, Dartmouth and Yale joined MIT in reinstating the SAT/ACT requirement, citing similar reasons for reinstating their SAT/ACT requirements.
“With the Supreme Court’s restriction of affirmative action last year, emotions around college admissions are running high,” wrote Leonhardt in conclusion. “The debate over standardized testing has become caught up in deeper questions about inequality in America and what purpose, ultimately, the nation’s universities should serve.”
“But 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. 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.”
Comments