Technocracy and Merit v. Equality and Progressive Politics in Higher Education
A Clash of Two Ideals in the University System
After being trashed for the last four years, standardized testing is returning to higher education. A number of high-profile schools are moving from test optional undergrad admissions to test required. The reason is pretty simple. Students who did not submit test scores did worse than those that did, and standardized tests are still a decent, if imperfect, way to project academic performance. For example. Dartmouth publicly announced that it was bringing back tests because those without tests did poorly and the same was found to be true at UT Austin.
Here, I want to think about the resurgence of standardized tests in terms of university culture. We’ll think about the following timeline. Standardized tests were initially a way of actually making colleges more open, after they had been excluding Black and Jewish students. That system of college admissions ran from about the 1940s to about 2010. Then, critics of standardized tests got the upper hand and were able to remove them, temporarily at least, in 2020, but they have now returned.
What does that suggest? First, in competitive schools, the technocrats have run college admissions for decades, they still control things, and they still care about merit. We can always point to a handful of rich kids or athletes who get into fancy colleges, but most college admission decisions are really about applying some very basic criteria to applicants. At most schools, you need some sort of minimal GPA and test score combination to have a chance at graduating. At more competitive schools, the GPA/test score combination is a basic threshold, and then other criteria are added to whittle down the pool of applicants. It looked like this system was at an end in 2020 but that was not the case.
Second, the timing of the test score pull back tells you a lot about the balance of power. While many students and faculty were suspicious of standardized tests for years, college admissions officers and their deans held on for decades. It was only the extreme rupture of progressive politics in the aftermath of George Floyd murder that allowed the policy to be attacked.
It is important to note the timing. The 2020 test score pullback was not based on new evidence that standardized tests did not have predictive value. It was a policy that catered to progressive notions of equality. Psychological researchers and educational scholars have long known that a well-designed standardized test is a useful tool for selecting students who would do ok in academics.
What’s the conclusion? First, despite themselves, universities still have a technocratic core and they still care about merit in some sense. The value of having students who do well in classes trumps a passion for equality and social justice. Second, the damage done to sound policy in the emotionally charged summer of 2020 was fixable. Given some data, and further research, universities did come to the reasonable conclusion. Third, we should rely on decades of well-crafted and scholarly research on standardized tests. not momentary passion.
Bottom line: Merit and technocracy 1, impassioned politics 0.
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