One of the less remarked-upon gender gaps is in
college attendance: Young men have fallen far behind young women. Males now
make up only 43
percent of college students despite continuing to earn
slightly higher
average scores on college admission tests.
Perversely, journalist Paul
Tough’s much-praised new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us,
calls for America to worsen this inequality by
dumping the SAT and ACT for being biased toward boys.
To Tough, college
entrance examinations are just another conspiracy to make white boys look good.
One important fact that Tough points out is that prestigious
colleges have vastly more money to spend per student than do less famous
colleges. Although list-price tuitions at private colleges are virtually the
same (and the average private student now gets a 51 percent discount as
“financial aid”), the famous colleges receive immensely larger gifts, so they
have far more to lavish upon their students.
Consider
Harvard (which, perhaps not coincidentally, took the lead in developing
the modern
testing system in the 1930s and 1940s).
In 2013,
the president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust (or Doctor Faust), announced a $6.5
billion fundraising goal, the most ambitious campaign in higher-education
history. But when it was over, Harvard had raised $9.6
billion. (It’s almost as if Harvard is adept at picking applicants
who, decades later, will write giant checks to Harvard.)
So, in
the unlikely
event that you get a chance to go to Harvard rather than to
Directional State U., you might well consider it. For example, if you run into
a rough patch, Harvard has the resources to help you avoid flunking out. And if
you are thriving intellectually, Harvard has all sorts of delightful amenities
for the best minds.
In turn, some lucrative careers such as consulting and
investment banking don’t recruit much at non-rich colleges.
“At present, the ideological winds are blowing toward abolishing
testing rather than reforming it.”
By the way, this history suggests one reason Harvard gives
advantages in admission to legacies and athletes in minor sports. I strongly
suspect that donors who write eight-figure checks to Harvard tend to be some
combination of:
(1) Son of a Harvard grad;
(2) Did well on his SAT;
(3) Competed on a minor sports team like rowing or squash; and
(4) Now wants his daughter or son to go to Harvard.
I had hoped that Tough would have gotten access to the secret
statistical models that colleges have created of who donates and who doesn’t,
but he doesn’t seem to realize that they have studied this.
Strikingly, Caroline Hoxby, a
black economist at Stanford, is more or less the villainess of Tough’s book.
She did a study with Christopher Avery of lower-income students with high test
scores. Hoxby found that urban high scorers often applied to prestigious
colleges. But, Tough writes:
In contrast to that
small, ambitious group, the majority of high-scoring low-income students had
aspirations that seemed more constrained. They followed the same pattern as
lower-scoring low-income students, applying only to one or two institutions,
often including a local community college or nearby nonselective public
university.
Who are these overlooked smart high schoolers?
These students were more
likely to live in small towns or rural areas in the middle of the country and
to attend schools where they would be one of only a few high-achieving
students. They were also significantly more likely to be white; 80 percent of
them, in fact, were white, compared to just 45 percent of the achievement
typical students.
In other words, this country’s most
underprivileged reservoir of underutilized talent is Red State white boys.
In the U.S., undergraduate admissions are generally “holistic,”
meaning that the admissions committee gets leeway in weighing factors such as
high school grade point average, scores on various national exams, sports and
other extracurricular activities, recommendations, essays, legacy status,
parental donations, and so forth.
Standardized testing has always been the most controversial
factor, despite or, more likely, because of it being somewhat more objective
than the other inputs.
At present, the ideological winds are blowing toward abolishing
testing rather than reforming it.
Tough, for example, is much agitated about the inevitable fact
that some college applicants have higher test scores than grades while others
have higher grades than test scores. He tendentiously labels the former
“inflated SAT score students,” although one might with equal justification call
the latter “inflated GPAs.” After all, one purpose of having national tests is
to provide an objective measuring stick because grading standards differ from
high school to high school and even from class to class within a school.
But Tough
can tell who are the undeserving. Just look at them!
The students with
the inflated SAT scores were more likely to be white or Asian than the students
in the deflated SAT group, and they were much more likely to be male…. The
inflated-SAT students were more than twice as likely to have parents who earned
more than $100,000 a year and more than twice as likely to have parents with
graduate degrees. These are the students—the only students—to get a big boost
in admissions from the SAT.
In other words, smart kids who don’t earn as many A’s as they
might have in high school tend to be male, white or Asian, and have
well-educated and/or prosperous parents. Many of them flop in college, but more
than a few come into their own in higher education.
Tough is likewise outraged that kids from families that make
$40,000 to $80,000 earn a 3.63 GPA in high school and score 1624 (out of the
old 2400 maximum) on the SAT, while kids from families making over $200,000
earn only a slightly better 3.66 GPA, but average a notably higher 1793.
Of course, that’s because, on average, rich kids attend schools
with more rigorous grading standards than do not-rich kids.
Tough’s anti-test logic is that, because whites average higher
test scores than black and Latinos, that must be because whites do more test
prep.
And, because boys get modestly higher test scores than girls
while girls get higher high school grades, he assumes that must be because
boys, who on average don’t do as much homework as girls, must instead be
slaving away at test prep. (What other explanation could there be? It couldn’t
possibly be that smart girls tend to be more dutiful and conformist in high
school.)
Instead of tests, Tough argues, colleges should make admissions
fairer by relying even more heavily on high school grades, essays,
recommendations, and extracurriculars.
Does this make sense?
As you’ll
recall, there was much excitement earlier this year over the revelation
that Desperate Housewives star Felicity Huffman had
paid $15,000 to hire a ringer to impersonate her daughter in taking the SAT.
But this
kind of Ted Kennedy-style impostor fraud on a college admission test is no
doubt rarer, at least in the U.S, than a high school student getting help on
doing a science project or in writing the Me
Essay for a college application. (Who knows what goes on at
tests in the Wild Wild East of
Asia, though?)
The growth
of test
prep is Tough’s more reasonable concern. Yet, the current gaps
in test scores existed long before test prep became popular.
Moreover,
there are big regional differences among whites in test prepping, with, say,
Tri-State area students doing more than Nebraskans. As Tough notes, modern test
prep was invented in Brooklyn by Stanley Kaplan (assisted by the
14-year-old Chuck
Schumer, now the Senate minority leader).
Of course,
Asians get, by far, the highest test scores of all, and have been widening
the gap in this century. But Asians don’t come up all that much
in The
Years That Matter Most. They tend to confuse The Narrative.
This country needs to
reform testing, to get it back to doing the job it did fairly well in the past.
But few are interested in discussing how to fix testing because that would
require honesty, which tends to get you canceled these days.
If, instead, admission testing were eliminated in a
fit of ideological pique, the smart folks at Harvard would no doubt quickly
figure out some work-around and Harvard would continue to prosper, as it has
done for almost 400 years.
The rest of us, however, are
neither as clever nor as rich, so we would less be able to afford the
consequences of doing such a stupid thing.
