While debate rages about whether the presidents of Ivy League universities were unfairly targeted by Congress or appropriately lost their jobs, another debate has emerged within higher education with far greater consequences for the nation’s students: whether to reinstate high-stakes tests like the SAT as an admission requirement.
A narrative is developing, fueled in part by a recent New York Times article, that suggests colleges should reinstate the requirement, which many dropped during the pandemic, because one recent study demonstrated that those scores are excellent predictors of student performance. I’m here to say: Not so fast!
This debate, too, has its roots with the Ivy League plus a few additional, highly selective universities, like MIT and Stanford. It is based on studies conducted by them and about them, rather than data from the thousands of other (non-Ivy League) colleges across the country.
Opportunity Insights, based at Harvard University, conducted one study, and the other was led by Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman, who are from Harvard and Brown. The findings were based on student data from Ivy League institutions plus Stanford, MIT, Duke University and the University of Chicago. There is no student data included from nonselective to moderately selective institutions. Worcester State University falls into that category, and, together, these schools enroll the other 90%-plus of the nation’s students.