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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Little programming note, tonight is our Listening Party Live in The Green Space with Future Islands. They will be performing. I will be asking the question. It will be live-streamed. That's at 7:00 PM. We sold out tickets, so it's going to be a great full crowd, but you can join it from the comfort of your home if you like.

Next Wednesday our Get Lit with All of It Book Club event at the New York Public Library, our partners, we will be discussing Day by Michael Cunningham. Our musical guest is Josh Ritter. That is also available via live stream. For you hardcore book club members, you can go to our Instagram stories right now, @allofitwnyc. We have an Instagram poll up about the book.

On this Thursday, we're going to be talking about the Oscar nominations, which came out today. We have spoken with many of the nominees. Jeffrey Wright, from American Fiction, that is nominated for Best Picture and he's nominated for Best Actor. We've spoken to the team behind Past Lives, also nominated. Danielle Brooks was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in The Color Purple. We have a rollicking conversation with her, three out of the five documentaries. The directors have been guests on the show, including 20 Days in Mariupol. You can find all of those interviews at the All Of It website or on our podcast. That is in the future. Right now we're going to talk about higher education.

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Alison Stewart: It's been a turbulent few years in higher education. The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action last year. Campus political activity and activist trustees have students pitted against professors and even each other students. Then there are attacks on what is being taught. Opinions around the values of the nation's universities are polarized. Now add to the equation the role of the SAT, one time called the Scholastic Aptitude Test or the Scholastic Assessment Test administered by the college board.

During the pandemic, many universities dropped their standardized test application requirements, which some progressive education activists had been urging for years arguing it would diversify campuses. According to new reporting from David Leonhardt of the New York Times, dropping SAT requirements with that purpose hasn't exactly worked out. Leonhardt's piece explores new data that suggests that test-optional admissions are actually harming the chances of underrepresented groups, especially bright students from smaller or less rigorous high schools. With me now to talk about his reporting in the piece, The Misguided War on the SAT, we will also take your calls, is New York Times Senior writer David Leonhardt. David, welcome to the show.

David Leonhardt: Thanks so much for having me, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want to hear from you. Do you think the SAT/ACT should be required for college admissions? Why or why not? Pretty simple. Call 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Of course, it's not a simple subject. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You may call in and join us on air. You can also text to us at that number. You can reach out on social media @allofitwnyc.

Maybe you're a teacher or you're in college admissions or you're a parent of a high school or a kid in college, what has been your experience with the SAT and the college admissions process? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Maybe you're someone who believes in test optional. We'd like to hear from you as well. I want to get into the history of the SAT a little bit. How was the SAT first designed and introduced into the education system, David?

David Leonhardt: It's from the early 20th century. There was, generally, interest in scientific measurement in that time. It was the progressive movement and people were interested in the idea of measuring all kinds of things. One of the things that they wanted to do was measure people's aptitude and ability to do well in school. There are two real cross-currents with the history, one of which some people involved in the early history basically expected that it could be used to constrain opportunity and other people expected it could be used to expand opportunity. Both parts of that history are real although my guess is your listeners are more familiar with one-half of it than the other because one-half of it tends to get more attention.

The Progressive movement we remember as a left-wing movement, just think about the name, Progressive, but it was also a movement that was really shot through with a lot of racism. Eugenics, as it was called at the time. In particular, one of the people who was involved in the creation of the original standardized test for colleges had these eugenicist beliefs.

In particular, he believed that Anglo-Saxons were more intelligent than Jews and Southern Europeans, Mediterranean people coming from the Mediterranean era. He expected that the standardized test would show that people from England or Germany were more intelligent than Jews and Catholics from Southern Europe. Now he later rejected those views, recanted those views. It's clear that part of what some of the people involved in it expected was that it would basically show that wasps were more intelligent than other people.

At the same time, some of the administrators at Harvard who were most interested in adopting a test, they actually had a different view, which is they were worried that the United States was drawing its elite from too narrow a pool of the Anglo-Saxons. They actually thought there was a good chance that using a test could help them broaden the elite by identifying talented students from less typical backgrounds and bring them to campus.

If you're hearing all this and you're wondering, "Wait a second. It sounds like everyone is talking about today are people we would consider white," you are right about that, but it's worth remembering in the early 20th century the United States was nearly all white or Black. The Latino and Asian American populations were tiny in this country. These elite colleges were not really thinking about admitting significant numbers of Black students at the time. The debate was much more over whether to admit more southern Europeans and Jews, some of whom were not considered white at the time.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting to think of the SAT as a tool of equity.

David Leonhardt: Well, yes. Here's another way to think about it. If you believe that talent is very broadly dispersed, a standardized test has a real advantage because it gives people from backgrounds where these schools don't traditionally draw students, it gives people an opportunity to show just how talented they are. If what these schools are just doing instead is they're going to boarding schools as they used to do and they hand out dozens of acceptances just assuming and believing that the students who go to Andover or who go to Taft are obviously more intelligent than the public school students in New York, then comes along a standardized test. The public school students of New York get to demonstrate that in fact many of them are the most deserving of spots at these colleges.

Alison Stewart: When did its usefulness in that way start to be questioned, in its way of being something that makes it all the more equal?

David Leonhardt: Oh, my guess is there have always been people who questioned its usefulness. First of all, let's say this. The SAT is no fun to take. I'm 51 years old and I can conjure a very strong memory of a Saturday morning 35 years ago when I walked into a gymnasium nervously and sat there on a hot day in May and had these fans whirring away while I took this test. I didn't enjoy that. I think some of this is who likes the standardized test.

Then I think more recently there are gaps in average scores in the SAT and the ACT. People in the Northeast don't tend to talk about the ACT as much, but huge numbers of students take the ACT and colleges have always accepted both the ACT or the SAT historically. There are gaps. On average, rich students do better than poor students. On average, white and Asian students do better than Black and Latino students.

I think people have looked at those gaps and they've said, "The test must be biased or it must be something that causes increased inequality," and haven't always asked, "Wait a second. Is it that the test is biased or is it that we live in a society with terrible racial inequities and there are gaps in almost every measure?" There are gaps in life expectancy, but that doesn't mean the life expectancy statistic is biased. There are gaps in poverty, but that doesn't mean the poverty statistic is biased. I think there's a real question. Are these tests perpetuating inequality or are they finding it?

Alison Stewart: Reflecting it, the idea. I always thought that you should have to list what you did 48 hours before the test. Did a car take you home and you sat down to dinner with your two parents or were you a kid who had a job and then had to look after your little brother, and then you were able to get up in the morning and go to swim practice, and then you took the test? Either ways, to your point.

David Leonhardt: Exactly. Look, I don't think the decision about whether these schools should mandate the test is an easy decision. We can talk about that. Look, it's very convenient to take a view of like this is an obvious decision. This is both bad and it's useless. What a lot of the critics of the test have said is it fosters inequality and it is useless or even counterproductive. Part of what I'm trying to say is it's not useless. It's measuring something real. The SAT and the ACT are clearly now better predictors of how students will do at the top public and private colleges than high school grades are. A huge University of California analysis found that to be the case. It found that over time the gap was growing probably because of high school grade inflation.

Two new pieces of academic research that have come out have also found that standardized tests are a better predictor of how students will do in college than grades. I think the question becomes if it's actually something real, if it's measuring students' academic preparation and to some extent academic potential but it also if used in the wrong way, does have the potential to perpetuate inequality. What do we do about that? This isn't a convenient situation in which the SAT is a useful guide and it has no downsides, or it's a useless test and it could perpetuate inequality. If one of those two scenarios were true, this would be easy. We should just get rid of it or we should just always require it. Life is a little bit more complicated usually than easy win-win decisions

Alison Stewart: From your reporting, why does it seem that SAT would be a better predictor of success in college than someone's grade point average?

David Leonhardt: Part of it comes back to what we were saying before, it's standardized. I understand that that word makes people uncomfortable, but it's another way of saying it's equalized across the population. Imagine that you went to Stuyvesant, the famously rigorous public magnet school in New York, and you got an A in physics. Imagine that I went to a school with much less of a history of emphasizing science education, and I got an A in physics. I don't think your A in physics and my A in physics necessarily mean the same thing. Whereas if we both take the math test on the SAT, we're taking the same test.

That has always been the case. There's just a lot of variation in high schools out there. A particular issue is these college admissions counselors who are trying to make the decisions, they know Stuyvesant, so I use Stuyvesant. They know what Stuyvesant means, but there are thousands of high schools across the country that they don't know as well. It's hard for them to know, "Wait a second. Maybe this A in physics is actually really meaningful. It's just we haven't recruited a lot of kids from that high school and so we don't know it is."

Then the second problem is grade inflation. I think again, it's important to note that University of California analysis found that the test scores were a better predictor than grades, and the gap was growing over time. I think that's because we've seen grade inflation and so the number of kids who are getting overwhelmingly A's and B's, or even just overwhelmingly A's in high school, has grown over time. If everyone's getting A's and B's and everyone applying to these very top schools getting overwhelmingly A's, then the grades just aren't that useful.

As the head of admissions at MIT said to me, "We can't make decisions just based on A's. There are too many kids out there getting virtually all A's." You and I haven't even talked about the other parts of the application process, college essay, extracurriculars, school recommendations, all of which are really badly biased toward privileged kids because college-educated parents edit their kids' essays because private schools spend hours crafting these beautiful essays about how special the students are at their schools.

I don't doubt they're special, but students are also special at public schools where guidance counselors have 500 kids and they tell the kids that they need to write their own recommendations for the school. Once you get beyond grades and standardized tests, you're into an area which is really unequal. Who can afford to play travel soccer or take violin lessons, or travel to another country to do a social justice project? The question answers itself.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the piece, The Misguided War on the SAT with New York Times senior writer, David Leonhardt. Got some folks who want to weigh in. Let's talk to Barry, calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Barry. Thanks for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

Barry: Hey. Thank you for letting me jump in here. Should I outline what I was thinking about talking about quickly?

Alison Stewart: Absolutely.

Barry: Great. David, thank you for taking this. As I said earlier, my daughter is a junior in high school starting into this whole college tour business, looking at different places, studying very hard. She's doing well in school. She is not a good SAT, well, PSAT right now, taker. My concern as a father is we are debating about whether or not she continues on and actually takes the SAT. Our concern is if she does not do well, do we provide those scores? Do we not provide those scores or do we simply not have or take this?

What is the real climate or what is the real attitude behind universities in the admissions offices about a student who applies for admission and simply does not provide the scores? I grew up in the 1980s in high school and SATs were absolutely a requirement and the scores were sent through. Has that climate truly changed or not? That's my question.

Alison Stewart: We're about the same vintage. I guess the idea is if it does say test-optional-- Is test-optional a real thing from your--

David Leonhardt: It is a real thing.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

David Leonhardt: It's a real thing. Look, I think these schools know that kids who come from relatively privileged high schools, both public and private, are almost certainly taking the test. They're submitting it only if it's good for them because that's reality. We know that. I think when they're looking at kids from high schools in California where the system won't even accept SATs and ACTs anymore, let alone the test-optional then they're more likely to assume, well, maybe the kid just didn't take the test. I think the same is true with kids coming from disadvantaged schools.

Look, I think it's going to vary by school. I do think sometimes people make a mistake of they think that the student needs to be at the average for the school to submit a score. I think if an applicant is in the broad 25th to 75th percentile, it's still worth submitting because from a relatively privileged school, if you don't submit, they're probably going to assume you're lower than that. Look, I don't want to suggest. My journalism is mostly not about offering strategic advice for applying to college. It's much more about the larger socioeconomic forces. I'm sure there are better people than me to offer strategic advice about when or when not to submit scores.

Alison Stewart: My guest, David Leonhardt, he wrote the piece called The Misguided War on the SAT. We'll take more of your calls and your texts after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is David Leonhardt. He's a New York Times senior writer. He wrote a piece called The Misguided War on the SAT, rethinking about, or thinking about how the SAT should be used. David, during COVID, obviously schools said, "Hey, we can't have kids gathered in large groups and taking the test." From the people that you spoke to, what happened after that class or those two classes who didn't take the test?

David Leonhardt: Yes. Two things really came together. One, there was this long-term skepticism about standardized tests, particularly among people on the political left. Universities are dominated by people on the political left in our polarized society. Universities are a place that they're not just on the left half of the political spectrum, but in many of these places, the center of political gravity is probably to the left of the center of the Democratic part. Then becomes COVID which as you said, really made it impossible for kids to take the test. These two things combined and long-term concerns that progressives had had about the SAT combined with this pause of doing it, and many schools said, "Actually, we're going to keep our test-optional policy. We're not going to go back to doing it."

Now, in general, the very selective schools, both public and private, have not announced this is their permanent policy. In general, they've still said it's temporary, but obviously, the pandemic is over. Has been over for some time now, but they've still stuck to it and so it really raises this question of are they ever going to go back to requiring tests. I will tell you from the conversations I've had, administrators of these schools are really torn about it. It's not that there's one view. There are different views, but I would say as a group, they're not sure what to do. I think many of them are trying to decide right now.

Alison Stewart: No, I've read a couple of letters from college presidents and they truly are torn.

David Leonhardt: Yes, they are. I think in part, look, they've seen this research that shows that standardized tests are a better guide to how someone will do in college than really any other part of the application process. I don't mean they're enough. I'm not saying decisions should be based overwhelmingly only on standardized tests, but they really are quite useful. On the other hand--

Alison Stewart: The question is, what does the test measure? It's useful for measuring what the test measures.

David Leonhardt: See, this is the key thing. It's useful for measuring how kids will do in school, which is much more than just about the test. It is useful for telling who will do well in science classes in college. That is specifically what the research shows. It's not just like, can you then go take another standardized test? It's what will your GPA be in college? What are the chances that you will graduate college? What are the chances that you'll get into one of the best graduate schools? It's specifically predicting how well students will do in college.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to remain a little skeptical. Let me take a couple of texts. "I don't think the issue is what admission metrics are used, but rather larger structural issues with access to higher ed. Affluent families always have the advantage since they can hire people to prepare for the tests or write essays or whatever schools they're looking for. I'm in the business of tutoring and I know the financial lengths that families will go to get into top schools." Julie from Washington agrees with what you're saying. Julie, thank you for calling in.

Julie: Hi, there. This is Julie. Can you hear me?

Alison Stewart: You are on the air.

Julie: Oh, great. That's what I was going to say actually. I've been following this story for a while. Mr. Leonhardt, I really understand what you're saying about how these tests they're standardized, which is really important. Students need to be able to apply knowledge in a high-pressure setting. Families paying for private tutoring, it's a pervasive issue, not just through the SATs, but for applying to college in general. I guess I'm just wondering, how do you navigate this? Are these tests really assessing inequality if they really reflect so much of what an individual family can afford?

David Leonhardt: I think the test prep question is a really important one because obviously, test prep exists out there. Obviously, it's another potential way in which the tests could involve inequality. I think it's good to look at a couple of different pieces of the research here. The research on the exact effect of test prep isn't great. It isn't that clear. To the extent that it does exist, test prep just doesn't seem to have a huge effect. Actually, some of the biggest found effects of test prep are among lower-income kids rather than among upper-income kids.

I think it is true that if you took a kid who did nothing to prepare for the test and compare that to a kid who did intensive test prep, the one who did intensive test prep would do meaningfully better. The same is also true for someone who studied alone. The same is also true for someone who did the online free test prep that is now widely available from Khan Academy and other places. I've tried to figure out, wait, how could it be that the research suggests test prep doesn't have that much of an effect? I think it's got to be some of that. The difference is not actually not preparing for the test at all versus test prep. It's preparing for the test one way or doing this test prep. Which, by the way, the test prep companies have an incentive to exaggerate how good it actually is.

I think what I found to be the clearest piece of evidence, the test prep just isn't that big a deal. There's this test called the NAEP. Most people will never have heard of it because state by state, actually it goes by different names. It is the Nation's Report Card. Once a year, when you read headlines that talk to you about how much eighth graders have learned or how much fourth graders have learned and how that's changed over time. Recently, we saw alarming headlines about how much it declined during COVID. That comes from the NAEP. It is a test kids across the country take.

No one takes test prep for the NAEP. For an individual kid, it doesn't matter. It's measuring the school and the state and the district, not the individual kid. No one takes NAEP test prep. Yet the gap between rich and poor kids on the NAEP is nearly identical to the gap between rich and poor kids on the SAT and ACT. What that shows us, as Raj Chetty, who's an economist at Harvard and has studied this, told me, what that shows us is that all of these tests; the NAEP, the SAT, are picking up real things about how much kids know. We still have to grapple with how do we want to deal with that given inequality. We shouldn't pretend, oh, the SAT and ACT aren't actually measuring anything other than wealth. They are measuring something.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Travis from the Bronx. Hey, Travis.

Travis: Hey, how's it going?

Alison Stewart: Good.

Travis: I called in because I'm a special education teacher and I also was someone who did pretty poorly on the SATs. When I went into my community college and took the admissions test there, I actually scored perfect on both the English parts, scored relatively high in the math part, and was entered into the honors program immediately. I see a really stark difference between a multiple-choice test also, I have to say, and the actual coursework that comes with college. No one asks me to take a multiple choice test when I'm writing an essay when I'm doing research. No one would ask you not to use a calculator in a college-level course if you're taking an algebra course. I think that the SAT also creates a lot of standards that are just quite frankly not really matched up with college readiness, to be frank.

Then one other thing I would share very quickly is, when we're talking about standardized test, I also think of the SHSAT and the disparity that that test creates. I think a really great example of that is the fact that Stuyvesant High School only admitted 7 Black students out of their new 762 students. There are definitely some disparities that these standardized tests do create.

Alison Stewart: Travis, thank you so much for calling in. Also, David, somebody makes money from this, right? The college board makes money off of the SAT.

David Leonhardt: We live in a capitalist economy. Somebody makes money from almost everything. Someone makes money from the food we eat and the cars we drive, and if you're a subscriber to the New York Times, the news you read.

Alison Stewart: My point is, who is out there who is able to challenge the college board? Who can challenge this idea? I'm really stuck on the disparity between rich and poor kids. I'm really stuck on that in the test-taking. Especially with the test prep, you're assuming a kid can even get to test prep when you're talking about the disparities being small. Aren't we missing so many great kids, so much potential, if we think about the SAT as being this important?

David Leonhardt: First of all, I want to emphasize, was it Travis who was the last caller?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

David Leonhardt: Who talked about going to community college. The SAT and ACT are not at all important for most colleges in our country. We're talking here about, should they be a tool at the most selective colleges? Places like University of Michigan, places like MIT, places like Pomona. We're talking about, I don't know, is it dozens, probably, of colleges? Whereas high school grades are absolutely sufficient for most colleges. Many colleges will take anyone who has a high school degree and qualifies and applied. We're talking about a relatively small subset of colleges here.

The question becomes, should these standardized tests be one part of the process or do we ignore them, even though the research shows that they are the single best predictor of how students will do in college? The research shows there are huge numbers of kids from underprivileged backgrounds who do really well on the test. So that it really does have the potential to show colleges, hey, this is a kid who grew up with wind in her face, with wind in his face. Despite that, this kid did really well on this test. That does a better job than all these other things that we might hope would predict college grades, but actually do a worse job of it.

I think Melissa Kearney, who's an economist at the University of Maryland, had an interesting reaction to some of this research. Which is, sometimes there are things that feel as if they should be the right thing to do and feel as if they should expand opportunity. When you actually look at the research, it suggests that they don't. My concern is that standardized tests are one of those things that feel as if getting rid of them should actually help toward equity and excellence, but the reality may be that that's not really the case.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Tara from Manhattan. Hi, Tara. You've been holding for a while. Thank you for holding.

Tara: Hi. Thank you. I've been a test prep tutor for almost three decades. I've worked with people from many different economic backgrounds, definitely of course more kids who could privately afford tutoring. I've also worked with a number of pro bono students and students with different organizations for underprivileged kids. One thing that I want to bring up is just the way that prepping for the test actually changes the student. I feel like so often, I see students just turn into college students as they're prepping for the test. Much like in the way that the whole college process transforms a student.

If it's something that they're committing to, if the student themselves is motivated to excel and feels like this is their opportunity, you see people develop study habits. You see people change their sense of how much agency they have in the world. It is this beautiful thing. I don't know that that's really been in the discussion in terms of why there may be some kind of correlation.

Then the other thing that I want to bring up is just that-- By the way, that previous thing I was saying, I'm not just talking about students who work with tutors. I'm just talking about how students engage with the test. Students who are trying to do well on it and study over a long period of time, whether they're working with tutors or they have their parents at home who are invested in their education or they have access to free resources, whatever it is, I feel like that accounts for a lot.

Then the other thing I just wanted to say was I'm actually pro-test optional. I think that the test is useful for some reasons, like the one I just mentioned. I think really the problem is how it's looked at and how it's used. I think that the way that you can work against the disparity is really to absolutely acknowledge that there are such a plethora of gifts that kids have to offer when they're coming to a school. Universities know that their student bodies are enhanced by people with different learning styles, different kinds of intelligence, different gifts to offer the community.

Alison: Tara--

Tara: I don't think that anything that's-- Yes, go ahead.

Alison: I just need you to wind up because we need to-- What's your last point?

Tara: Yes, yes. No, I just wanted to say that I feel like everybody would benefit if we could look at the SAT and even grades, honestly, as not like one of the three major things or the things that kids have to hit, but just make that one way that a student's able to distinguish themselves out of a multitude of ways [crosstalk].

Alison: Tara, thank-- Yes, I'm going to dive in, Tara. Thank you so much. David, is there anything about your reporting or about this piece that you'd like people to understand? Do you think either being misinterpreted or we haven't touched on?

David: I really appreciated the reaction. I appreciated the discussion. I would encourage people to go online and check out the charts that run with the piece because I know some people are skeptical that standardized tests actually matter for anything other than the test itself. I hear some of that skepticism in your voice, Alison.

Alison: I've studied education. I've written a book about education. I respect your reporting. Somebody's saying here I don't understand, I understand. I'm just being politely skeptical and pushing so we can have this conversation.

David: Yes. No, no, I appreciate the skepticism. Look, we don't have enough respectful questioning and disagreement and skepticism in our society today. I'm all for it. Look, I think, put it this way. For the people who've studied this and look at how people do in college, these standardized tests do a better job of telling you how someone's going to do in college than anything else. Given that, part of my question is, I get the risk that we'd use them too much, but boy, why would we ignore them when we're asking students to do so many other things? When we're asking them to write essays about their favorite color or all these sort of silly topics, why not also make part of that something that actually has a lot more rigorous claim on empirical value than some of the other parts of the college application process?

Alison: Thanks to everybody who texted in with thoughtful things, except that one guy or girl. Thanks to everybody who called in too, and a big thanks to David Leonhardt. You should read the piece. It is called The Misguided War on the SAT. Thanks, David.

David: Thank you, Alison.

 

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