3/9/23

Elite students

Elite students

Rob Henderson points to new trends in elite academia that will likely favor insiders over outsiders. He begins with an autobiographical note:

Suppose you’re a poor teenager in a dysfunctional environment.

You have to work a part time job to help make ends meet. Your parents are absent or completely checked out. So you have to help take care of your younger siblings. You’re smart, but you’re not in a position to devote much time to homework; to getting top grades in every class. But you set a few hours aside in an afternoon, and receive an outstanding score on the SAT. Suddenly, options become available to you.

That matches his personal experience, since he grew up abandoned by his own parents. He spent his youth bouncing through a series of unfortunately dysfunctional families in the foster care system, where he did not benefit from a stable home environment that promoted school achievement. He was thus never a good student. But when he took the SATs before graduating high school, he was one of the top scoring youths in the country, which earned him a ticket to Yale (after an enlistment detour through the U.S. Air Force).

As Henderson reports, Columbia University has become one of the first of the elite colleges to abandon the standardized SAT/ACT college aptitude tests as part of the admissions process. The tests have served to counter-balance the pressures for the schools to admit well connected insiders—the offspring of parents who attended, and who write considerable alumni donation checks—regardless of their college aptitude measured by standardized tests.

Climbing the status hierarchy is a perpetual human endeavor, it has been observed, as a means of figuring out who gets to lead and make decisions for society as a whole. There is an innate tendency for our species to behave like most other animals in having a pecking order (to use the clichéd but apt analogy) and to expend a lot of time and effort engaged in sorting it out.

The elites desire to make their lives appear glamorous, as Thorstein Veblen set forth in his Theory of the Leisure Class. To do this they consume luxury goods for public display, to make their lives look exceptionally cushy. Henderson updated Veblen’s concept with his own of luxury beliefs: glamorous ideas the elites can subscribe to at little cost to themselves. Yet the ideas themselves turn out to be bad or destructive in practice for those at the lowest rungs of the human social ladder whom they are meant to help.

Henderson argues that eliminating standardized testing as an admissions criterion will end the chance for those from lower social classes ever to get into elite schools and programs. He makes the case that this is not only the end effect, but also by intentional design. It seems just as plausible to me that the former may be true, while the latter cynical isn’t actually required. The end result may be an even more homogenous ruling class.

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For the unfamiliar, Rob talked about his ideas and background in an interview here: