Who Needs Harvard? – Education Next

I’m assuming you had to take the SAT to apply to Harvard, where you went to college. Do you have any memories of taking the test or doing test prep?

I was in the Harvard class of 1976, and we arrived in the fall of 1972. We were put into this big auditorium called Sanders Theater. The speaker sent to welcome us was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then in a brief stint on the faculty between government jobs. I remember him saying, in his distinctive way, “This is the most talented group of people ever assembled in one room in the history of the world.” That was kind of the vibe at the time. We were the first real SAT generation, so there was just this sense of a whole new social era dawning, where these unbelievably special and talented people, through testing and being brought to Harvard, were prepared to do great things in the world.

Remind us how and why we started using standardized tests for college admissions.

The father of the SAT, in the psychometric sense, was a man named Carl Brigham. But the father in the social and organizational sense was James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard in the ’30s and ’40s and into the early ’50s—a very influential educator. His first mission was to change the population of Harvard College from being, roughly speaking, the sort of people who populated F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels to being people from all over the country—as much as possible from public schools and modest middle-class backgrounds—who were going to become a sort of public spirited, technocratic elite.

Was the belief that standardized tests would provide a level playing field for students?

He was really interested in elite selection. What he wanted was to have these big catchment areas where you’d be able to identify the 1 percent of highest IQs so you could get them into top universities and put them to work for the society. The test was a mass audition for an elite system. It wasn’t this sense that the slots in these schools are rewards and should go to the people who deserve them. It was much more, “We want to pick the people who can be of most specialized service to the nation.”

What would you say was your main critique of the SAT coming out of your 1999 book The Big Test?

The SAT set off this whole idea that admission to elite universities is, in fact, an individual reward, and, therefore, it should be competed over, obsessed over, become a source of social conflict. That, I think, is unfortunate. Second, universities—at least elite universities—basically decided to do two things at the same time that seem contradictory. One is to stress standardized tests in admissions, and the other is to become more racially diverse. Those two objectives are in direct conflict. But universities are complicated places. To the people running them, the attitude was, “Let’s do both at the same time and we’ll make it work.” But it actually has led to a lot of conflict and many lawsuits—and, finally, an evidently dispositive Supreme Court decision in 2023.

There’s a kind of alternate history. Another vision was that the country’s primary goal in higher ed should be creating as many college graduates as possible. The test of success is not: do we have just the right super elite who really deserve it? The test is: how many people can the higher education system and the education system in general get into a socially and economically meaningful middle-class life?

The key conclusion in your new book, Higher Admissions, is that in our big focus on admissions testing, we’re solving for the wrong problem, because most students don’t go to the elites. Tell me a little bit more about that.

The person who is really eloquent about this is Richard Atkinson, who used to be the president of the University of California. The SAT was a direct descendant of an IQ test, and to some extent it still is that. But from a social point of view, Atkinson has made the point very forcefully that you’d want the big test to be a curriculum test, not an aptitude test. That way it says to all students in high schools in America, “If you want to do well in this test, just study your course material.” It doesn’t have this sort of mystification of the SAT. It doesn’t have the test prep problem as much. And it sends a signal to students: study in your courses.

It transforms the critique of “teaching to the test”. That’s one of the anti-testing mantras. Suddenly it becomes just doing your work.

Right. Just to use an example: when you’re in 3rd grade, your teacher says on Monday, “Ben, here are your spelling words for the week. On Friday, I’m going to give you a spelling test and see if you can spell the words.” That’s teaching to the test, but you learn how to spell the spelling words, right?

You write in both books about the University of California system and Clark Kerr’s very influential Master Plan, which attempts to reconcile these goals of elite selection and mass opportunity. Could a state system like California’s, divided into tiers that includes selective research universities as well as open-access community colleges, serve as a model for balancing academic excellence with broad access?

In a sense, we have that right now, and we’ve never not had that in the whole testing era. California has been an outlier in recent years. What I thought was going to happen after the Supreme Court decision was that everybody would just say, “We’re still test optional.” I’ve been surprised that a significant handful of universities have gone back to SAT-required admissions. But the California system is not test optional. They don’t look at standardized tests at all. They look at Advanced Placement scores, but they do not look at ACT or SAT scores. I would argue that, if you don’t have those tests, the world doesn’t come to an end. You still have the ability to create a great class and have a great university. Nobody says that UC Berkeley is now a terrible school because they don’t look at SATs.