Should colleges be in the business offering remediation for knowledge that should have been acquired in K-12? Is it in the best interest of students who aren’t ready for college level courses to have to pay to take remediation courses? At what level of deficiency do you say that the best venue for remediation is not colleges and does it not just continue to foster inequities to make recipients of inferior K-12 education have to pay for what should have been free?
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And I bet that you could also say that children from high income families are disproportionally correlated with all sorts of career success. The old social darwinism fallacy is at play: “They succeed because they’re the best!!” ie, we’re/they’re rich and powerful because we/they deserve it. As opposed to “They succeed because they have more opportunities!” (aka, the Jared/Ivanka argument)
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Interesting stats, @Data10. As you said, the data doesn’t show why there is such a strong correlation, but I don’t think it’s just a matter of test prep tutoring (although that is likely one among many factors).
I agree that it’s not surprising that affluent kids are more likely to submit scores (despite test optional policies). My reason for stating that I believe affluent kids benefit most from test optional is because for those wealthier kids who are inclined to cut corners (or who have an attitude of entitlement), the option of not preparing for a high stakes test is pretty appealing. I recognize that some kids work hard and still don’t score very well, so again, I’m not saying that preparation is a guaranteed ticket to a high score, nor am I saying that lower-scoring kids lack work ethic (again, context here is critical). I’m saying that affluent kids know they will be expected to do fairly well on the test and feel pressured to do so—and given the multitude of opportunities and advantages they’ve had along the way, I don’t have a problem with that.
As @Thorsmom66 notes, not all kids need to do much prep, but even those who are naturally good at this type of testing (or who are naturally very bright) familiarize themselves with the format. As with anything, some of us catch onto something after a few tries (or on the first try!) and others take much longer. The point is that we need to know where we land on the continuum and plan accordingly.
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This is, by the way, one of the specific bits of MIT that makes our math education such a constraint. All MIT students, regardless of major, must take — or get transfer/advanced credit for — 18.01 single variable calculus, the “lowest” level of math we offer, which covers approximately the yearlong AP BC curriculum over that term, meeting twice a week (so moving fast). So that’s a very tight bottleneck on math readiness constraining the entire first year class, particularly when you factor in widespread inequality linked to race and class further down the K12 pipeline.
Given the rest of the MIT education, it is the appropriate mathematical foundation, but I would certainly hope other schools, with different educations, would have other, less steep pathways into math, that might nonetheless bring students to the same luminous summits. This is why a diversity of educational models — with legitimate opportunity on the other side of them, not a narrow social reproduction of elite privilege — is so important.
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I do think the gap between the most prepared and the average or underprepared student has widened greatly in the last 50 years. There was a time when few students entering college even had calculus.
More importantly, private schools can do as they wish. If the public schools like the UCs are finding more kids failing now, they can either offer more remediation, lower their standards, or fix their admission system.
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I posted specific numbers earlier in the thread. SAT scores only explained 1-2% of variance in which Ivy+ grads attended elite grad schools (defined as Ivy+ or one of 4 publics) or worked at prestigious firms (defined as firms that employ a disproportionately large portion of Ivy+ grads).
I mean this isn’t what the Chetty study seems to suggest.
There’s a clear graph on page 4 (Figure 6 - Summary sheet of the Raj Chetty study) that seems to suggest that SAT/ACT is a pretty big predictor of success in post-college outcomes (I believe the study looks at Ivy+ applicants).
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That’s a slight of hand.
You’re controlling for test scores here - what is the relationship between extracurricular rating and income when you don’t control for test scores.
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A lot has changed in college preparation/college admissions in the past 50 years! Colleges are businesses. They want their students to complete their education, graduate, succeed in their careers and donate back to their schools. It makes perfect sense to want to admit students that are likely to be, at the very least, academically successful.
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I listed with controls for test scores because that is the format the study lists. It doesn’t show percent receiving high non-academic rating without control for test scores. The study does suggest little difference in rate of high non-academic by income among students who score <= 1300 SAT, which would include the vast majority of the total population for both low and high income groups, so I wouldn’t expect large differences across the full population of students, like occurs for SAT scores.
Instead the study suggest that it’s more students with the highest SAT scores that show the largest difference in EC rating between top 1% income and <90th percentile income, particularly the slim minority of students who score 1500+. 1500+ SAT kids with top 1% income were roughly twice as likely to have high EC ratings as 1300 SAT kids (regardless of income). While 1500+ SAT kids with <90th percentile income were a much smaller 30% more likely to have high EC ratings than 1300 SAT kids.
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John McWhorter (Columbia/NYT) supports a related/slightly different angle:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/opinion/bard-early-college.html
This, perhaps supported by schools with ginormous endowments, can potentially reduce testing gaps and more importantly any preparation gaps that may exist.
As I read the comments above, I didn’t notice any reference to the opinions of one of the authors as noted in the Harvard Gazette. The work by Chetty et al. is often used to support getting rid of testing or at minimum supporting test optional. Deming seems to have reached different conclusions:
Not saying he’s right or wrong, but probably should be included in the discussion along with the opinions of Leonhardt and Vigdor.
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I always liked standardized test for my kids as a secondary source/check to see how they are doing. Especially in K-5 when it was hard not to make an A.
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As someone who did very well in math, I laugh/worry at the obsession with math in academics. We spend far too much time on other subjects and label kids far too quickly who are not strong at math. We are long overdue for a healthy debate on how we open up the toolbox to more disciplines.
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I’m guessing Russian?
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“MOCKBA”
The Soviets did NOT. mess. around. with math.
No matter how much you toe the party line on social studies, those rockets have still GOT to fly. 
No doubt the Russians have got it going on when it comes to math. American math education definitely lags.
The Russians are here to help
Calculus around the World, linked below. An excerpt:
“The first and most glaring difference is the assumption in the U.S. that calculus is a university-level course. Almost everywhere else it is assumed that students on a more mathematically intensive track through high school will learn the basic tools of calculus before arriving at university, usually beginning in grade 9 or 10.”
Calculus dwarfs SAT math in difficulty. Yet, making SAT testing mandatory is such a controversial topic in the U.S.
https://www.mathvalues.org/masterblog/calculus-around-the-world?format=amp
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I’m not sure it’s the SAT specifically. It seems many in the US are against any high stakes testing in k-12.
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