{"id":2003,"date":"2014-09-11T17:44:36","date_gmt":"2014-09-11T21:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2003"},"modified":"2017-01-12T12:17:08","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T17:17:08","slug":"steven-pinkers-inflammatory-proposal-universities-should-prioritize-academics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2003","title":{"rendered":"Steven Pinker’s inflammatory proposal: universities should prioritize academics"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you haven’t yet, I urge you to read Steven Pinker’s brilliant piece in The New Republic<\/em><\/a> about what’s broken with America’s “elite” colleges and how to fix it. \u00a0The piece starts out as an evisceration of an earlier New Republic<\/em> article<\/a> on the same subject\u00a0by William Deresiewicz. \u00a0Pinker agrees with Deresiewicz\u00a0that something<\/em> is wrong, but finds Deresiewicz’s diagnosis of what<\/em>\u00a0to be lacking. \u00a0The rest of Pinker’s article sets out his own vision, which involves America’s\u00a0top universities taking the radical step of focusing on academics, and returning extracurricular activities like\u00a0sports to their rightful place as\u00a0extras<\/em>: ways for students to unwind, rather than a university’s primary reason for existing, or a central\u00a0criterion for undergraduate admissions. \u00a0Most controversially, this would mean that the\u00a0admissions process at US universities would become\u00a0more like that in virtually\u00a0every other advanced country: a relatively-straightforward matter of academic performance, rather than an exercise in\u00a0peering into the\u00a0applicants’ souls to find out\u00a0whether they have a special\u00a0je ne sais quoi<\/em>, and the students (and their parents) desperately gaming the intentionally-opaque system, by paying consultants tens of thousands of dollars to develop souls for them.<\/p>\n

(Incidentally, readers who haven’t experienced it\u00a0firsthand\u00a0might not be able to\u00a0understand, or believe,\u00a0just how strange\u00a0the undergraduate admissions process in the US has become, although Pinker’s anecdotes give some\u00a0idea. \u00a0I imagine anthropologists centuries\u00a0from now studying American elite university\u00a0admissions, and the parenting practices that have grown up around them, alongside cannibalism, kamikaze piloting,\u00a0and other\u00a0historical extremes of the human condition.)<\/p>\n

Pinker points out that a way to\u00a0assess students’ ability to do college coursework—much\u00a0more quickly and accurately than by relying on the soul-detecting skills\u00a0of admissions officers—has existed for a century. \u00a0It’s called the standardized test. \u00a0But\u00a0unlike in the rest of the world (even in ultraliberal Western Europe), standardized tests are politically\u00a0toxic\u00a0in the US,\u00a0seen\u00a0as instruments\u00a0of racism, classism, and oppression. \u00a0Pinker reminds us of the immense\u00a0irony here: standardized tests\u00a0were invented\u00a0as a radical\u00a0democratizing <\/em>tool, as a way to give kids from poor and immigrant families the chance\u00a0to attend colleges that had previously only been open to the children of the elite. \u00a0They succeeded at that goal—too well for some\u00a0people’s comfort.<\/p>\n

We now know<\/a> that the Ivies’ current emphasis on sports, “character,” “well-roundedness,” and geographic diversity in undergraduate admissions was\u00a0consciously designed<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0(read that again) in the 1920s, by the presidents of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, as a tactic\u00a0to limit the enrollment of Jews. \u00a0Nowadays, of course, the Ivies’ “holistic” admissions process no longer fulfills that\u00a0original purpose, in part because\u00a0American Jews learned to play the “well-roundedness” game as well as anyone, shuttling their teenage kids between sports, band practice, and faux charity work, while\u00a0hiring professionals to ghostwrite application essays that speak searingly\u00a0from the heart. \u00a0Today, a major\u00a0effect of “holistic” admissions\u00a0is instead to\u00a0limit\u00a0the enrollment of Asian-Americans (especially recent immigrants), who tend disproportionately to have superb\u00a0SAT scores, but to be deficient in life’s\u00a0more meaningful\u00a0dimensions,\u00a0such as lacrosse,\u00a0student government, and marching band. \u00a0More generally—again, pause to wallow in\u00a0the irony—our “progressive”\u00a0admissions process works strongly in favor of the upper-middle-class families who know\u00a0how to navigate it, and against the poor and working-class families who don’t.<\/p>\n

Defenders of the status quo have missed this reality on the ground, it seems to me, because they’re obsessed with the notion\u00a0that\u00a0standardized tests are “reductive”: that is, that they reduce a human being to a number. \u00a0Aren’t there geniuses who bomb\u00a0standardized tests, they ask, as well as unimaginative grinds who ace them? \u00a0And if you make test scores a major\u00a0factor in admissions, then won’t students and teachers train for the\u00a0tests, and won’t that pervert open-ended intellectual curiosity? \u00a0The answer to both questions, I think, is clearly\u00a0“yes.” \u00a0But the status-quo-defenders never seem to take the next step, of examining\u00a0the alternatives<\/em>\u00a0to standardized testing,\u00a0to see\u00a0whether\u00a0they’re even worse.<\/p>\n

I’d say\u00a0the truth is this: spots at the top universities are so coveted, and so much rarer than the demand, that no matter what<\/em> you use as your\u00a0admissions criterion, that thing will\u00a0instantly\u00a0get fetishized and turned\u00a0into a commodity by students, parents, and companies\u00a0eager to profit from their anxiety. \u00a0If it’s grades, you’ll get a grades fetish; if sports, you’ll get a sports\u00a0fetish; if community involvement, you’ll get soup kitchens\u00a0sprouting\u00a0up\u00a0for the sole purpose of giving ambitious 17-year-olds something to write about in their application\u00a0essays. \u00a0If Harvard and Princeton announced\u00a0that\u00a0from now on, they only wanted the most laid-back, un<\/em>ambitious kids, the ones who spent their summers lazily skipping stones in a lake, rather than organizing\u00a0their whole\u00a0lives around getting in to Harvard and Princeton, tens of thousands of\u00a0parents in the New York metropolitan area would immediately enroll\u00a0their kids in relaxation and stone-skipping prep courses. \u00a0So, given that reality, why not at least make the fetishized criterion\u00a0one\u00a0that’s uniform, explicit, predictively valid, relatively hard to game, and relevant to universities’ core intellectual mission?<\/p>\n

(Here, I’m ignoring criticisms specific to the SAT: for example, that it fails to differentiate students at the extreme right end of the bell curve, thereby forcing the top schools\u00a0to use\u00a0other criteria. \u00a0Even if those criticisms are true, they could easily\u00a0be fixed by switching to other tests.)<\/p>\n

I admit that my views on this matter\u00a0might be\u00a0colored by my strange (though as I’ve learned, not at all\u00a0unique) experience, of getting\u00a0rejected from almost\u00a0every “top” college\u00a0in the United States, and then, ten years later, getting\u00a0recruited for\u00a0faculty jobs\u00a0by the\u00a0very same institutions that had rejected me as a teenager.<\/em>\u00a0 Once you understand how undergraduate admissions work, the rejections were\u00a0unsurprising: I was a 15-year-old with perfect SATs and a published research paper, but not only was I young and immature, with spotty grades and a weird\u00a0academic trajectory, I had no sports, no music, no diverse leadership experiences.\u00a0 I was a narrow, linear, A-to-B thinker who lacked depth and emotional intelligence: the exact opposite of what Harvard and Princeton were looking for in every way. \u00a0The real\u00a0miracle is that despite<\/em> these massive strikes against me, two schools—Cornell and Carnegie Mellon—were nice\u00a0enough to give me a chance. \u00a0(I ended up going to Cornell, where I got a great education.)<\/p>\n

Some people would say: so then what’s the big deal? \u00a0If Harvard\u00a0or MIT\u00a0reject some students that maybe they should have admitted,\u00a0those students will simply go elsewhere, where—if they’re really<\/em>\u00a0that good—they’ll do every bit\u00a0as well as they\u00a0would’ve done at the so-called “top” schools. \u00a0But to me, that’s\u00a0uncomfortably close\u00a0to\u00a0saying: there are millions of people who go\u00a0on to succeed in life despite childhoods of neglect and poverty. \u00a0Indeed, some of those people succeed partly\u00a0because<\/em> of their rough childhoods, which served as the crucibles of their\u00a0character and resolve. \u00a0Ergo,\u00a0let’s\u00a0neglect our own\u00a0children, so that they too can have the privilege of learning from the school of hard knocks just\u00a0like we did. \u00a0The fact that many\u00a0people turn out fine despite unfairness and adversity doesn’t mean that we should\u00a0inflict<\/em> unfairness if we can avoid it.<\/p>\n

Let me end with an important clarification. \u00a0Am I saying that, if I had dictatorial control over a university (ha!), I would base undergraduate admissions solely on standardized test scores? \u00a0Actually, no. \u00a0Here’s what I would do: I would admit the majority<\/em> of students mostly\u00a0based on\u00a0test scores. \u00a0A minority, I would admit because of something special about them that wasn’t captured by\u00a0test scores,\u00a0whether that something was musical or artistic talent, volunteer work in Africa, a bestselling smartphone app they’d written, a childhood as an orphaned war refugee, or membership in an underrepresented minority. \u00a0Crucially, though, the special something would need\u00a0to\u00a0be special<\/em>. \u00a0What I wouldn’t<\/em> do is what’s done today: namely, to turn “specialness” and “well-roundedness” into commodities that the great mass of applicants have to manufacture before they can\u00a0even be considered.<\/p>\n

Other than that, I would barely look at high-school grades, regarding them as too variable from one school to another. \u00a0And, while conceding\u00a0it might be impossible, I would try hard to keep my university in good enough financial shape that it didn’t need any legacy or development admits at all.<\/p>\n

\n

Update (Sep. 14):<\/b><\/font> For those who feel I’m exaggerating the situation, please read the story of commenter Jon<\/a>, about a homeschooled 15-year-old doing graduate-level work in math who, three years ago, was refused undergraduate admission to both Berkeley and Caltech, with the math faculty powerless to influence the admissions officers. See also my response<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you haven’t yet, I urge you to read Steven Pinker’s brilliant piece in The New Republic about what’s broken with America’s “elite” colleges and how to fix it. \u00a0The piece starts out as an evisceration of an earlier New Republic article on the same subject\u00a0by William Deresiewicz. \u00a0Pinker agrees with Deresiewicz\u00a0that something is wrong, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-nerd-interest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2003"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2010,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003\/revisions\/2010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}