HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why Are We Pouring Money Into a Black Box? Why Are We Subjecting Our Young People to a Process with Such Little Transparency? Why Are We Risking Our Economy On It All? Because doing these things suits the interest of our ruling class, of course. The same reason we’re doing so many other dysfunctional things, too. The key is, it’s bad to have a ruling class that has a vested interest in dysfunctional things.
Plus:
Princeton still requires the SAT. How much does it matter? You don’t know, and you can’t know. Neither can the kids who break their backs to get in or the parents who develop ulcers over it. They keep such information close to their chest, even as people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on application fees annually for the tiny chance to attend. The answer is almost certainly that the amount the SAT matters is entirely variable, depending on how badly they want a student, and how badly they want that student depends on money, on prestige, and on cobbling together a little phony diversity for the brochure. And for this untold thousands of young people work their asses off and invest all their hopes, and on its basis we decide who goes on to affluence and professional success.
It’s hard for me to overstate the absolute audacity of these schools insisting on even less transparency. Princeton is an institution that sits on a $37.7 billion dollar endowment, for which it has enjoyed an annual 12.7% return over the past decade. This is an astronomical sum of money, but then, when you’re exempt from the large majority of taxes that apply to most human institutions, it’s a little bit easier. I can’t imagine there’s a lot of people getting Pell grants but they’re handing out Stafford loans, federally underwritten, and they receive hundreds of millions in federal research funds. Typically there are all manner of other means through which taxpayer dollars are making their way onto a given college campus. And for our money and our trouble we get a tiny number of elites graduating into affluence and a school that thinks that the way they choose students just isn’t our business. Imagine, cruising through life as a tax-free entity with an endowment the size of the GDP of Uganda, and being expected to open your books to the taxpayers. The very thought.
I guess for many people the SAT is such a visceral nexus of anxiety and insecurity, even decades after they took it, that they are simply incapable of critical thinking about this issue. And so they never pause to ask, “could these existentially elite institutions, which deepen inequality and further the interests of the moneyed and powerful at every turn, perhaps be getting rid of the SAT for reasons other than a pure and sincere commitment to racial and socioeconomic diversity?” I would argue that, if you really care about our poorer and Blacker teenagers, you would feel even greater need to be ruthlessly cynical in understanding the institutions that you naively think will save them.
That’s not how to get ahead on the left. Or in most of the institutional right, for that matter.
Related thoughts here.