On a special episode of The Excerpt podcast: One of the many ways the COVID pandemic upended education was with regards to college admissions. Widespread lockdowns meant that in-person tests like the SAT and ACT were no longer offered. That led dozens of high-end universities to drop those requirements. Many thought this was a good thing, leveling the playing field for disadvantaged applicants. But recently, there’s been a trend to reverse that. Which students are being hurt by this decision and which ones are getting a leg up? Our guest, John Friedman, Professor of Economics at Brown University and Co-Director of Opportunity Insights at Harvard University, studies the impact of standardized testing on social capital and economic mobility.

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Taylor Wilson:

Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson. Today is Wednesday, March 20th, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

One of the many ways the COVID pandemic upended education was with regards to college admissions. Widespread lockdowns meant that in-person tests like the SAT and ACT were no longer offered, and that led dozens of high-end universities to drop those requirements. Many thought this was a good thing, leveling the playing field for disadvantaged applicants, but recently there's been a trend to reverse that, which students are being hurt by this decision and which ones are getting a leg up. I'm now joined by John Friedman, professor of economics at Brown University and co-director of Opportunity Insights at Harvard University, who has studied the impact of standardized testing on social capital and economic mobility. John, thanks for joining me today on The Excerpt.

John Friedman:

Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

So, John, earlier this year, Brown joined Yale and Dartmouth and announcing it will again require the SAT for admissions. How did they justify the change?

John Friedman:

I think it's really about looking at the data to understand what role the test scores are playing in admissions and then how that affects not only the overall pool of admitted students but also how it might differentially affect different students from different types of backgrounds. So first of all, the test score just turns out to be a good predictor of academic preparation. Students that have higher test scores are more likely to be academically successful in college, they're less likely to have academic struggles, and they're also more likely to be successful by various measures after they leave college.

Now, all of that, I think, would be not super helpful if the test score were biased in some direction. For instance, if it understated the academic preparation of students coming from less well-resourced backgrounds, and so we also tested that. We looked to see just, basically, if two students from different backgrounds have the same test score, let's say two kids each have a 1400, are they predicted on average to do about the same? And the answer is yes, but especially in these Ivy Plus school contexts, it really seems like the test score is giving a good and unbiased predictor of academic preparation.

Taylor Wilson:

So, John, I must admit, I was someone who really liked taking standardized tests. I felt like it showed my strengths. I know not everyone feels this way, to say the least. Who does standardized testing help, and who does it hurt?

John Friedman:

It's a totally understandable situation. These are stressful events, and it's not something that students often get excited for. But it turns out that test scores are not only, as we've discussed, good predictors of academic success, they also seem to be one of the fairest measures. And so when you think about who do test scores benefit, we have to ask relative to what? And in most academic contexts, there are several other measures that schools might turn to in the absence of test scores. One measure might be other, more nuanced signals of academic strength. For instance, have you taken an AP test? Have you been involved in research or taken in some other advanced academic curriculum? But that there too is something that's typically much more available to students who are either individually from high-income families or they're attending well-resourced schools. It's not something that's broadly available in the population.

High school GPA is another thing that colleges might look to in the absence of test scores. Unfortunately, for students that are on the border of admission at schools like Brown, grade inflation in recent years has made it so that there's just not a whole lot of useful information in GPA to predict academic preparation. You could admit many times over a full class at lots of these schools of students that have a 4.0, a perfect GPA at their local school, that's just not getting the job done in terms of the admissions process that needs to happen.

Taylor Wilson:

Recently, the SAT was changed, so not everyone is getting the same test. Part two depends on how the student does on part one, for instance. Is it possible for standardized tests to be engineered to level the playing field for everyone?

John Friedman:

Well, that's, I think, what the tests have been aiming to do from the very start, right? These tests started historically as exactly a way to identify really talented students from outside of the traditional network schools that fed students into these colleges. The idea was that it didn't matter who you knew. If you just did well on the test, that was a way to identify you as a really promising student. Now, we know historically that these tests have not always lived up to that promise. And that's why I think it's really important just to look at how these tests perform in the data, right? It's a data-driven question. Whether these tests offer a level playing field for students coming from different backgrounds or whether they're tilted in one direction or another, no test is going to be perfect. But what the data show in these contexts is that, one, the tests do appear to be pretty fair and that they're much fairer than many of the alternative ways that one could measure academic preparation.

Taylor Wilson:

John, where you attend college can clearly have a profound impact on the future path and success of a student. What are some measurable ways this decision point impacts a student down the road?

John Friedman:

Colleges are really crucial for shaping a student's future trajectory. It matters who their peers are going to be. It matters what type of instruction they're going to get, and it matters what type of hiring networks these colleges launch students into. And so, in recent work, we've looked at what's the causal effect of being able to attend an Ivy Plus college relative to even the very best public schools like Michigan and Berkeley in this country. And what we see is, not only do students earn about 25% more, they're about 50% more likely to be in the top 1% of earnings. You're twice as likely to be attending an elite graduate school, and you're nearly three times more likely to be in one of these prestigious firms that really puts students on track towards leadership and socially influential positions later in life. And so these decisions about where to go to college, and as part of that, the admissions decisions that colleges are making, it's really impactful.

And so I think it's incredibly important that we try to do that in a way that provides as much equal opportunity as possible for students that are applying and perhaps even tries to push back on many of the social inequalities that exist more broadly in society to try to help level the playing field in terms of opportunity.

Taylor Wilson:

John, for schools that don't require standardized tests, what are they focused on with student applications, and how have they tried to help people who are more diverse economically, socially, and culturally?

John Friedman:

So without the information of the test score, schools will look to other measures of academic preparedness like high school GPA, like performance in advanced coursework, or even just the fact that you took advanced coursework to begin with. So, for instance, at UC Berkeley and the rest of the UC system, similar analysis there shows that test scores are a good predictor, but high school GPA is also a good predictor.

The other thing, especially private admissions offices look to, are a range of non-academic characteristics. These might be a student's extracurricular activities, a student's personality, other factors. And those factors particularly seem to be quite imbalanced in the way they affect admissions, specifically students from higher-income backgrounds. Students from very well-resourced schools seem to be able to shape their extracurriculars in ways that lead to more of the type of thing admissions offices look for. They get recommendation letters from teachers and guidance counselors that have more time to focus on writing really high-quality letters for a small number of students that really draw out the nuances of an application in ways that lead to much higher admissions rates for students, even with the very same test score from high-income families compared to those from low and especially middle-income families.

Taylor Wilson:

So you touched on something crucial there. I think, John, does this issue differ for private versus public universities? And also, how do we fix this bias towards students of privilege?

John Friedman:

I think that what's very important is to be able to evaluate a student's level of academic preparation in context. And so what I found across a bunch of different findings is that focusing on academic characteristics and qualifications, it seems to be easier to adjust for a context than when trying to do that for non-academic factors. So let me give you an example. Suppose that a student is coming from a high school that doesn't offer that many AP classes. An admissions officer can say, "This student has taken two AP tests." And even though that's well below the average for most admitted students, that's really taking advantage of all the opportunities that that student had in his or her context.

Whereas for non-academic factors, it's much more difficult to realize that here's a student who might've legitimately done something pretty cool and interesting last summer. Here's another student who just worked a job at the local pool. And that's because the first student had the resources to spend that summer in a different way, either to financially support themselves. They had the information that spending the summer in that way would be helpful on their college application essay. It's just much harder, I've found, to undo that effective context when focusing on these non-academic characteristics. And so, I think, whether it's the test or other factors, the academic aspects of applications seem to be the fairest in terms of providing a level playing field across different students from different backgrounds.

Taylor Wilson:

John, this is an election year. How is the issue of standardized testing playing out on the campaign trail?

John Friedman:

I think that as schools start to bring back test scores, it's something that may help in fighting back against what I think is a very serious problem, the lack of faith in these institutions of higher education. There's a concern that these institutions are just kind of making it up as they go. They're filled with liberals, they're not judging students based on their merits. And I think, again, test scores are not perfect, but it's a step in the direction of really trying to evaluate students based on their academic preparation and merit in that way. And so I do think this helps restore faith in these institutions, as really those that support mobility for all students, those that support equal access in our society.

Taylor Wilson:

So, John, for students that aren't in the 1% who are looking at an evolving admissions process, what should they keep in mind?

John Friedman:

So, I'd say there are two pieces of advice. So the first thing is to make sure you take the test, take it seriously, because this is going to be a piece of information that can help really distinguish you. Second, I think you should really think about the test, even if you're applying to a school where it's not formally required to submit the test. And most of these schools really do evaluate test scores in context. So even if you have a test score that's below what you see on the website as the average test score, your admissions chances are probably a lot higher than you think, especially if you submit the score.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. John, thanks so much for being on The Excerpt today. Great insight.

John Friedman:

Thanks so much for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Bradley Glanzrock, for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.