Should colleges and universities—especially those regarded as elite—use the scores students earned on standardized tests in making admissions decisions? That has been a heated subject of debate for several decades. Opponents of testing claim that the tests are unfair to minority students and help perpetuate the socioeconomic supremacy of affluent whites, while defenders argue that standardized tests help schools distinguish between students who are capable of doing the level of work required and those who aren’t.
Which side is right? Does it really matter?
In his new book, Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing, Nicholas Lemann weighs in on that debate. He is dean, emeritus, at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the author of several books, among them his history of the SAT, The Big Test.
Lemann leans toward the view, common among those on the left, that standardized testing helps to solidify America’s inequities. Lemann’s new book does not give a conclusive answer to the question posed in my title, but he clearly leans toward the view, common among those on the left, that standardized testing helps to solidify America’s inequities. I don’t find this very persuasive, as Lemann writes with admiration for “progressives” and ignores those who disagree with them.
The book begins with an historical survey of standardized testing. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (now just called the SAT) originated in 1926 when Harvard’s president, James Conant, wanted a test to measure “what he saw as innate intellectual ability, unconnected to the quality of the applicant’s high school education.” That sounds reasonable; Harvard wanted to broaden its applicant base beyond its traditional prestigious New England feeder schools. The SAT, Lemann informs us, was driven by Conant’s vision of a future America with “a more democratically elected educated elite, not enhanced opportunity for the majority of Americans, and not the advancement of historically marginalized people.”
Lemann writes with admiration for “progressives” and ignores those who disagree with them. That is to say, the SAT was not aiming at group equality.
During the following decades, the SAT and its sponsoring organization, the Educational Testing Service, became fixtures in our educational landscape, but it wasn’t long before sharp criticism appeared. In 1948, two scholars argued that the SAT served “to reinforce, not undermine existing systems of social advantage.” Their argument was that the SAT was not neutral; it favored the children of well-to-do families, who would then go on to earn degrees from our top colleges and universities, launching them on the path to success. Meanwhile, children of poor families would struggle with the SAT, confining them to lesser colleges, if they got into college at all.
Lemann notes that, back in the 1940s and 50s, almost nobody cared about admissions at elite colleges because very few students went to college at all, and the “elite” colleges were themselves not very selective, admitting most applicants.
That changed starting in the 1960s, with the enormously successful campaign by the Ivies and a few other schools to persuade Americans that they offered a superior education. They were given a huge boost with the advent of the U.S. News college rankings in 1983, which reinforced the idea that selective schools were much better than others.
Then, beginning in the 1970s, the “elite” institutions embraced the idea that they should strive for a more racially diverse student body. Since, as they said, they were responsible for training the country’s future leaders, it was essential that their student bodies be “representative” of the nation’s diversity. Therefore, they began aiming at students from “underrepresented” groups, establishing what amounted to admission quotas.
The problem was that, based on SAT data, it was evident that the top schools were discriminating in favor of students from certain racial groups and against others. Beginning with the DeFunis case in 1974, the Supreme Court grappled with the problem that schools receiving federal student-aid funds were discriminating in favor of students based on race. Wasn’t that illegal? The Court avoided a decision by declaring the case moot. But then another case came along in 1977, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. It fractured the Court, and the deciding vote turned out to be that of Justice Lewis Powell.
Lemann focuses microscopically on Powell’s opinion, which, he informs us, was actually the work of one of his clerks, Robert Comfort, who was given the task of finding a middle ground between saying that racial preferences were unconstitutional and giving them complete approval.
Comfort’s reading of many of the amicus briefs backing the use of racial preferences by the U.C. Davis School of Medicine led him to suggest to Powell that he craft his opinion to say that colleges and universities could use race as a means of enhancing the quality of education for all students. That satisfied Powell. There was no concrete evidence that the racial mixing of students actually did make courses better, but it was a nice compromise that allowed racial preferences to continue.
‘Bakke’ was a wise decision, Lemann thinks, although he would have preferred that the Court give express approval to racial balancing. Bakke was a wise decision, Lemann thinks, although he would have preferred that the Court give express approval to racial balancing. He argues that the “educational benefits” justification that Powell relied upon “amounted to an invitation to future lawsuits, because it didn’t make it clear that programs favoring Black people, unlike programs favoring other categories of people, are okay.”
This is a good point at which to note a weakness in the book, namely that Lemann never engages with people who oppose racial preferences. Might there be sound reasons for wanting to keep the government from favoring certain classes of citizens? Lemann never tells his readers that, when Bakke was before the Supreme Court of California in 1976, the decision, written by Justice Stanley Mosk, a renowned civil-rights advocate, went against racial preferences. Mosk wrote that, despite the good intentions behind the policy, it was “a dubious expedient.”
It’s too bad the book gives the impression that racial preferences are an unquestioned good. Nor does Lemann mention any of the non-constitutional objections to racial preferences, among them that it often mismatches students and schools, putting favored students into academic environments where they aren’t competitive (see, e.g., Mismatch by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr.), or that it leads to the lowering of academic standards to keep “diverse” students enrolled, a phenomenon Professor John Ellis describes in his book The Breakdown of Higher Education. It’s too bad the book gives the impression that racial preferences are an unquestioned good; that’s not the case.
In recent years (and especially during the Covid panic), many colleges dropped standardized testing, and Lemann is content with that, siding with those who claim that high-school grades are better than scores on standardized tests in recommending which students to accept. But, here again, Lemann ignores an obvious counter-argument—that at some high schools the academic standards are so low that students who look good will be admitted to college and then struggle terribly with the work because of their weak preparation.
Unexpectedly, Lemann then raises a good question about this: Why engage in this furious battle over testing—couldn’t we just leave it to the marketplace? He quickly responds, “Anyone who is reading this book will likely regard the idea as absurd on its face. What about all the large and small imperfections that exist in market systems and make them unfair—the favoritism, the self-dealing, the corruption?”
Lemann knows his readers.
Then he probes further, asking whether “a test-based meritocracy is much less unfair.” A good question.
In my view, neither “the marketplace” (i.e., a laissez-faire society based on individual rights and liberty) nor a “test-based meritocracy” is anything to worry about. The former minimizes favoritism and corruption, while the latter does no harm so long as we have that laissez-faire society. I say that because a truly liberal society is very good at recognizing and rewarding talent, doing so without regard to race, formal test scores, or educational credentials. Conversely, corruption and favoritism are punished in market competition.
In the years before the SAT, America was a (perhaps it would not be amiss to say “the”) country where people succeeded with their accomplishments. Where a person learned whatever he needed to know to do worthwhile things did not matter. Nor did his ancestry. Inventors like Elijah McCoy prospered because their inventions were so useful. Thomas Edison dropped out of school, which bored him. Great architects, scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs mostly learned on the job. They weren’t impeded by the supposed market imperfections that “progressives” lament.
Lemann’s mistake is the traditional mistake of leftist intellectuals, thinking that society would be greatly improved if only they could take over running it. F.A. Hayek called that the fatal conceit of socialism: We enlightened people must steer society! Unfortunately, their nostrums never turn out well.
The “progressive” notion that going to an elite university is the key to success was never accurate. In the case of higher ed, the vision of a more prosperous and equitable society through nearly universal “access” to college, refined by making sure that enough students from “underrepresented” groups are admitted to our most prestigious universities, has backfired. The manias of college for everyone and “diversity” have made higher ed much less affordable and much less educationally valuable than in the days when we left it alone.
We should stop fretting about standardized testing and elite college admissions. The “progressive” notion that going to an elite university is the key to success was never accurate. As liberal writer Frank Bruni pointed out in his book Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote for the College Admissions Mania, many Americans who have attended “lesser” colleges (or none at all) have been highly successful. And as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa observed in Aspiring Adults Adrift, some students who graduate from prestigious schools nevertheless wind up scrambling for jobs that don’t require college education.
Nor is there any reason to think that those who have gone to prestigious schools make for wiser leaders. Thomas Sowell nailed the truth in his book Dismantling America when he wrote, “Many colleges claim that they develop ‘leaders.’ All too often, that means turning out graduates who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.”
Decades of racial preferences in admissions to supposedly elite colleges have indeed given the country quite a few leaders who came from “underrepresented” groups—most notably Barack Obama—but they haven’t led us well. That’s because their education imbued them with the progressive ideology that smart people in government will figure out how to transform society.
In the end, Lemann’s book is much ado about nothing. We should stop fretting about standardized testing and elite college admissions. Leave education to the market, and the country will be much better off.
George Leef is director of external relations at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
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George Leef
