And yet, the meritocratic revolution in higher education did not bring about the social mobility and broad opportunity that its early proponents expected and that educational leaders and politicians continue to promise. The best-endowed colleges and universities adopted need-blind admissions and generous financial-aid policies, removing a major financial barrier for promising students of modest means. Academic standards improved and median SAT scores increased. So did the routine admission to Ivy League colleges of any minimally qualified son of an alumnus. The favoritism that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton long accorded young men from upper-class boarding schools receded in the 1960s and 1970s. Notwithstanding the American dream of rising from rags to riches, upward mobility is less common in the United States than in many European countries, and there is no evidence of improvement in recent decades.
As we have seen, relatively few children of the poor rise to affluence, and relatively few children of affluence fall below the ranks of the upper-middle class. The haves and have-nots have not been trading places from one generation to the next. Inequalities of income and wealth have deepened since the 1940s and 1950s, and the social mobility that Conant saw as the remedy for a stratified society has not come about. Second, the system of meritocratic admission that Conant promoted did not lead to the classless society he hoped it would produce.
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Private tutoring helps, and a profitable industry has arisen to teach high school students the gimmicks and tricks to boost their scores.Īlso read: Ivy League universities offer free online courses amid Covid-19 lockdown This is partly because, contrary to long-standing claims by the testing industry, the SAT is coachable. While high school grades are to some extent correlated with family income, SAT scores are more so. He would be surprised to learn that high school grades are better than SAT scores at identifying low-income students who are likely to succeed in college. This is why he opted for the SAT to choose his scholarship students. Unsurprisingly perhaps, students from families with higher incomes and education levels made greater use of the online help than did students from disadvantaged backgrounds, resulting in an even greater scoring gap between the privileged and the rest.įor James Bryant Conant, an American chemist and former president of Harvard University, a test of aptitude or IQ held promise as a democratic measure of academic ability, untainted by educational disadvantage and the vagaries of high school grades. Although this was a worthy undertaking, it did little to level the test-prep playing field, as College Board officials hoped and claimed it would. It recently dropped that pretense and entered a partnership with the Khan Academy to provide free online SAT practice to all test takers. As meritocratic competition for college admission has intensified in recent decades, tutoring and test prep has become a billion-dollar industry.įor years, the College Board, which administers the SAT, insisted that its test measured aptitude and that scores were unaffected by tutoring. Some, in places like Manhattan, charge as much as $1,000 per hour for one-on-one tutoring. Those in high-scoring categories are also, overwhelmingly, children of parents with college degrees.īeyond the general educational advantages well-off families can provide, the SAT scores of the privileged are boosted by the use of private test- prep courses and tutors. If you come from a poor family (less than $20,000 per year), your chance is one in fifty. If you come from a family with an annual income greater than $200,000, your chance of scoring above 1400 (out of 1600) is one in five. For scores that put students in contention for the most selective colleges, the gap is especially stark. At each successive rung on the income ladder, average SAT scores increase.
The higher your family income, the higher your SAT score. To the contrary, SAT scores are highly correlated with wealth. First, the SAT, it turns out, does not measure scholarly aptitude or native intelligence independent of social and educational background.