So considering kids of top 0.1% most likely have got to the best schools in the country, and had every tutoring opportunity available, it’s shocking that only 7% of them could score 1500+.
It is almost impossible to make enough money to put the family into the top 0.1% through any career that requires high level analytical capabilities. While a tiny number of engineers have been able to enter that bracket, most tech billionaires are not engineers, but business people. The people who made the intellectual breakthroughs that have allowed these billionaires to make their billions are rarely in the top 1%, much less the top 0.1%.
Really, the only way to make billions besides inheritance is to center your life around making money. The vast majority of the top intellectual and academic talent in the country are not interested in doing that.
The people figuring out the structures of the atoms, the cures for cancer, the structure of the galaxies, the interactions between living things, the social processes that start wars, etc, want to spend their time doing that, not playing with money to make more money.
So the sample size of kids in the top 1% whose parents are in the professions which require the best academic and intellectual talents is going tp be pretty small. We can look at the top 20% to top 5% (or 2%).
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you don’t have to make billions, engineers or not, to be in the top .1%.
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The only way you can have truly comparable scores is to have everybody raised by the same parents with identical education. That’s not happening. Yet this test is still very much learnable by capable kids of most backgrounds. Still much easier to shine at this than have stellar extracurriculars because of parents knowhow and connections.
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There are many Chetty papers. Can you link to the one which contains the graph you posted? Thank you in advance.
The better the K-12 education, the higher the test score. I agree test prep can raise scores for some students. But asking/expecting a student to teach themselves Algebra 2 is a bridge too far for many.
Not always easy for a student who has a subpar K-12 education to ‘shine’ at standardized tests, which is a not insignificant proportion of US students. Not sure your point about ECs or what you would call ‘stellar’ ECs. At the college where I work, student with jobs (to take one example) are as highly valued as any other EC, including research, or sports team captain, or robotics team championships (just to take some common examples.)
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^ this is KEY. At many low performing or rural schools, the top students are in Algebra 2 junior year and only a handful go further (literally, there are schools where fewer than 15 students get to precalc in 12th grade - whereas there are schools where it’s common for college-bound 10th graders to take precalc).
If you’re taking the SAT with only Algebra1, Geometry, and half of Algebra2 -some of which you’ve tried to teach yourself through Khan Academy videos- you can’t score well on the math part of the test because a large part includes concepts you’ve never learned and/or haven’t practiced with a teacher.
There are students for whom the test is made difficult through no fault of their own and we shouldn’t expect them to “teach themselves” algebra indeed - We wouldn’t ask students to take the AP Calc exam without taking calc yet it’s the situation these students are in.
That’s why there are different ways to look at scores: UCs do very well at identifying students they want without scores because they know “their” schools well and know how to decipher transcripts; highly selective colleges that recruit nationally can’t know all the schools so they may use “scores in context” where a 1350 if the school average is 810 is as impressive as,or more impressive than, a 1500 where the school average is 1350. Of course we don’t know if the highly selective schools WILL do that.
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I remember this term affluenza. Although that may be something of a smokescreen, there are quite a few kids of the upper classes - not just top 1% but even the upper middle classes - who are, sorry to say, very lazy and entitled. Some of D’s wealthiest classmates were also the least motivated students. Why should they be motivated? Mommy and/or daddy will pay to get them a nice college education somewhere then hire them for their company which they will someday inherit and be equally wealthy as their parents. Sure, some are highly motivated to do great things with the opportunities they’ve been handed, but many are also happy to coast. So why should they care about doing exceptionally well on the SAT or even mastering the skills in class that would lead to a high score? Just because you have these advantages doesn’t mean you always fully leverage them. Sometimes you just take advantage for granted. And you do well enough which, in this case, even without making great effort, will often be better than kids without similar advantage. So maybe you get a 1300 and not a 1500. What difference does it make if your family is rich enough to ensure you a stable future? Is it worth the additional effort to raise your score? Perhaps for 7% of them it is.
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I dont disagree with you but that kid is also objectively not prepared for college at the same level. Pretending it is so by trying eliminating a test requirement doesn’t make them ready. If people put half the energy they put into worrying about who gets into Harvard into doing something about the quality and unfairness of early education in this country, we would not be having this conversation.
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Not everyone is even interested in a 1500 or a 1400 
and it’s..okay.
Some upper class kids are perfectly content attending their flagship university as long as they can join their father’s fraternity or mother’s sorority&pass their classes with minimal work, some will just use their prep school/legacy advantage at decent colleges they’re qualified for, and we know there’s a definite public for HPU, which caters to them with the country-club offerings in exchange for their “high” test scores in the absolute but not “high” for their SES.
What you describe is very apparent in a FANTASTIC book that unfortunately hasn’t been translated (it should, because it also questions some US sociological assumptions): titled Class Childhoods, it discussed how families invest in education, school, etc. After a few theoretical chapters, you jump into actual children’s lives, from lowest SES to highest. The highest SES child, Valentine, only needs to do well enough at her private school to not embarrass her parents. Her path is already picked out and what will matter most is manners&habitus, meeting “appropriate” (same-class) young people, etc. School is incidental. If she pushes herself good for her, but it’s not needed in any way.
On the other end of the spectrum you have a homeless child whose mother is so invested in his schooling she sleeps rough right next to the school. She does not know how to help him though (showing him educational videos on her phone?) and most of her time can’t be dedicated to educational needs because she needs to figure out vital needs (how to find food, surviving the night). Parents at the school decide to help and find her an apartment through a city program.. but it would require moving to a new neighborhood (though same school) meaning she can’t or won’t go because she’d lose her found places for free food, would have to walk long, etc. It’s bewildering for the school and the parents and disrupts the child’s schooling further. It’s not hard to see Valentine will graduate HS and college through no specific effort and it’ll be miraculous if the homeless child makes it to HS.
ETA reference
Also useful (in Spanish or French)
There was a WaPost? NYT? Long read about the travails of a working, homeless father with a gifted daughter and his situation in NYC was as maddening as it was deeply unfair to the little girl.
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If they complete Algebra 2 in 11th grade and take pre-calc in 12th grade, why not? Or even if they stop at Algebra 2. You don’t need calc - or even precalc - for college success if you are not in STEM. You can be fully prepared for a college education even if you stop at Algebra 2.
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I don’t think any one is pretending anything.
The reality is that many, maybe most, higher ed professionals don’t see the SAT/ACT as necessary for admissions, or placement, or identifying ‘diamonds in the rough.’ So, many with years and years of experience in education, admissions, etc., view things differently than some strong supporters of the tests. And that’s ok. Test supporters who haven’t worked in education or higher Ed, might benefit from a better understanding of why many who have worked in higher ed see things differently.
Of course schools can have whatever requirement they want. The fact that a few dozen schools have gone back to test required (including some for purely political reasons like the GA and TN public schools which were forced to) doesn’t change how many higher ed professionals view these tests. A large majority of colleges are going to remain test optional or test blind.
Absolutely. Just another example of the sad state of priorities in the US.
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If they need remediation, they don’t need to be going to schools requiring 1500+ SAT scores. There are few where such scores are needed. Most don’t.
I didn’t know we were talking about students who need remediation. It’s for each school to decide who they want to accept, not for you, I, or any other poster on this thread.
Plenty of college bound students need relatively basic classes (say, Algebra 2). One example is UT Austin, to take one example which has been discussed ad nauseam on this thread.
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Right I didn’t say top 0.1%. I brought up the 0.1% in relation to 7% of SAT scores. I am not sure what income range would be useful though 20% to 5% may be too wide since 20% isn’t really going to be able to afford tutors, private school etc in anywhere near the range that the 5% would. Perhaps the top 10% though even that may be too low since income is highly concentrated at the top so not sure the top 10% would be able to afford enough of the educational resources that the top 1% would have access to. Perhaps draw the line on incomes where the student would be full pay at the generous privates and then possibly exclude those over 1% or 0.5% as there may not be enough professionals above that range though there are some doctors/lawyers etc who are in the top 1% of earners.
Technicalities which do not change my point. So they’re making hundreds or even tens of millions. You still cannot make, or save, that much money from a salary.
The income range of mid-career engineers is around $170,000 to $250,000. The highest paying can get more, and engineers are usually not the only person working in their household. So engineers would be in the top 20% by income with some in the top 10% by income. but very few in the top 5% by household income.
Even if they are making $500,000 a year on an engineering salary, they cannot save $25 million in their lifetimes. Even a salary of $1 million does not allow them to do so. The only way to do so is if making money is your career. Most engineers who have that sort of money got that money through playing with money, and have not engaged in actual engineering as a real source of income for years or decades, if ever.
This isn’t the cafe. Let’s return to the topic of standardized testing.
Even when the high school offers a +1 math track, if the student was not placed in the +1 math track in middle school, the student would still be in the situation where the SAT math section depends on math just being completed at the end of 11th grade, so taking the SAT any earlier may result in a lower score because the student has not learned the needed math yet in math courses.
However, such a student could complete precalculus in high school and still be ready for college, including majors that start with calculus.
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1500+ SAT scores for admission to certain colleges is about competitiveness in admission, not about not needing remediation (except at a tiny number of such colleges like Caltech, Harvey Mudd, and MIT). Most other colleges that selective offer either precalculus or a slow-pace calculus combined with a review of high school algebra and trigonometry.
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