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To recruit the brightest students, regardless of socioeconomic factors, schools will have to do more than phase out standardized tests.
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About the author: Daniel Pianko is managing director of Achieve Partners.
The world of college admissions as we know it will never be the same. In the three years since the Varsity Blues scandal exposed the cynical “side door” to college admissions, all eight Ivy League universities have joined massive state college systems like Cal State University in abandoning standardized tests. Amherst became the latest selective school to eliminate legacy admissions. And affirmative action will likely be struck down by the Supreme Court.
These shifts reflect the fact that society at large has lost faith in the college admissions process. But while colleges themselves now recognize that they must replace a system widely acknowledged to be exclusionary, biased, and inefficient, they’re trying to solve the problem by relying on highly subjective metrics that differ greatly by high school—like grades, personal statements, and letters of recommendation. A growing body of research indicates that going “test-optional” doesn’t increase the socioeconomic diversity of the student body, and wealthy students still submit test scores much more often than their counterparts who grew up in lower income quintiles—which, despite colleges’ claims to the contrary, still seems to give them a leg up in the admissions process. The other screening mechanisms colleges are using to replace standardized tests may have actually tilted the scale further away from meritocratic admissions.
In short, few colleges are taking the step of actively seeking new ways to welcome students from the communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education. If they really want to build a better admissions system, schools will have to think much bigger than just replacing standardized tests with other proxies that still give rich families an advantage.
Some organizations are already demonstrating what’s possible when colleges start to think bigger. Consider the National Education Equity Lab’s initiative to enroll low-income high school students in an online Harvard course: 89% of them passed, and many have gone on to colleges they didn’t even imagine applying to beforehand. Elite universities could open up similar low-cost online courses, bolstered by in-person support and mentorship, at every school in the country. These colleges could skip the SAT, but invite formal applications from the top 10 percent of performers in those courses—not unlike the way things already work in Texas, where the top 10% of students in all high schools in the state are guaranteed admission to the most selective public universities. The Common App is taking a similar step, partnering with a select group of colleges to proactively offer admission to students based on grades and scores alone.
Ultimately, the world of college admissions should probably look less like it does now and more like Cerebro, the invention from Marvel’s X-Men comics that can find superpowered mutants anywhere in the world. Shouldn’t we be working on building the tools to help colleges find the country’s best and brightest, no matter where they come from?
It would be (relatively) easy, for example, for colleges to build a system to proactively identify budding robotics engineers by targeting top-ranked Lego builders, or student-built novel software programs built on repl.it. What about finding future financiers from the cryptocurrency community, or using Twitter to find the next generation of political scientists? What if we used social media reach as a metric of creative potential? The next Martin Scorsese is more likely to be an active social media tycoon with millions of followers on TikTok than a middling student whose parent happened to go to an elite school.
Employers, always ahead of the game, are already coming up with unconventional recruitment methods. In 2016, Goldman Sachs replaced on-campus first round interviews with pre-hire assessments to identify candidates from a broad range of schools, recognizing that the Ivy League was not creating a sufficient talent pool. Platforms like HackerRank have 11 million coders competing for top jobs, and job screening for positions from flight attendant to McKinsey analyst is no longer dependent on “fill in the bubble” tests. Companies like Entelo are helping employers identify talented workers who may not even be looking for a job. Even the state of Maryland recently committed to removing college degrees from many of its job postings altogether.
Of course, none of these ideas are silver bullets to the pervasive inequities in our education system. No single algorithm or strategy should be solely responsible for letting students into college, and we need to work proactively to ensure that any tools used for such a purpose avoid the all-too-common pitfalls of bias and shortsightedness. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find new ways to source unique talent and use emerging technology to help select diamonds in the rough. If we do, how many students who would otherwise have gone undiscovered will gain access to elite higher education’s hallowed halls?
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