What does SAT expand to? Student Affluence Test!

One of the best lines ever from the political theatre that I have had the pleasure of watching after moving to the country was the one delivered by Ann Richards, when I was just about getting acquainted with the actors and their affiliations, by which I mean politicians and their parties:

Poor George, ... he can't help it ... he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.

It was the best of the show business in America and I was hooked.  I remain a political junkie to this day, sadly! ;)

Bush, of course, went on to win the elections.  A few years after that, Ann Richards lost the governorship to Bush's son, "W."  And then she lived long enough to see "W" also get elected as president, and then get re-elected as well.

Being born even with a silver foot in the mouth helps. It helps a lot.  To make it is relatively easy when born into the "correct" contexts.

We discount the head start that the silver spoon kids get because of the other narrative that we want to believe--the Horatio Alger myth of rags to riches, from nowhere to the White House.  We are so desperate to believe in the myth that will go to any length to be in denial of the reality, which I have blogged often here, sometimes as choose your parents well.

Today's evidence is from SAT scores.  It will be a rare older American adult who does not remember his/her SAT scores from the high school days.  The number leaves a permanent imprint in one's mind.  Because of the repercussions that the score has for college, scholarship, and the rest of one's life.

It is increasingly clear that the SAT score is highly correlated with the silver spoon effect:

On average, students in 2014 in every income bracket outscored students in a lower bracket on every section of the test, according to calculations from the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (also known as FairTest), using data provided by the College Board, which administers the test.

Students from the wealthiest families outscored those from the poorest by just shy of 400 points. Given the widespread use of the SAT in college admissions, the implications are obvious: Not only are the wealthiest families best equipped to pay for college, their kids on average are more likely to post the sort of scores that make admissions easy.

Now, before you condemn that finding as something from a loony left publication, well, it is from the capitalist-friendly Wall Street Journal.  As I noted in a different context, if even the WSJ or the Economist is reporting about something that I have often worried about, it then means that the shit has hit the fan. Game over, folks. The end. Finito. The fat lady has sung.

Family wealth allows parents to locate in neighborhoods with better schools (or spring for private schools). Parents who are themselves college educated tend to make more money, and since today’s high school seniors were born in the mid-1990s, many of the wealthiest and best-educated parents themselves came of age when the tests were of crucial importance. When the SAT is crucial to college, college is crucial to income, and income is crucial to SAT scores, a mutually reinforcing cycle develops.

Yep, when you choose your parents well, a mutually reinforcing cycle begins.

The problem is glaringly obvious--you can't choose your parents.

So, what happens then if your parents happen to be, say, high school educated blacks who live a blue-collar life in the low-income neighborhood that has awful schools?  Tough luck, kid!  It is your fault that you didn't choose your parents well!

Now, think about the WSJ's report from just a few months ago:

Proving the adage that all of life is like high school, plenty of employers still care about a job candidate's SAT score. Consulting firms such as Bain & Co. and McKinsey & Co. and banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. ask new college recruits for their scores, while other companies request them even for senior sales and management hires, eliciting scores from job candidates in their 40s and 50s.

Yep, choosing the parents well is an awesome strategy--don't worry about the silver foot in your mouth because it will all work out in your favor, and you can even proudly beat up on others who can't make it despite all the "equal opportunity" that the land of the free provides!

How smart is your elementary school teacher?

One taboo subject on campus, perhaps on any university campus: anything to do with comparing intellectual abilities of students across majors.  We are expected to pretend that all students are equally capable.  (Plus, of course, pretentious faculty, even at teaching universities like mine, walking around as if they are geniuses!) 

And then comes the GPA issue.  We are suddenly faced with a situation where we find plenty of students with perfect or near-perfect GPAs in some majors, and far-from-perfect GPAs in others.  But, of course, academia being nothing but politics anymore where honest discussions are not allowed, we never openly engage in discussions.

So, we whisper in hallways, and might complain to colleagues we trust.  In my case, not having a colleague to trust makes it all the easier to blog about all these :)

In my second year as a graduate student, when I was a teaching assistant, one undergraduate student, who was in my discussion section, referred to the very course that I was TAing for as a "mickey mouse" course and that she had no problems earning high grades in many similar university courses.  I was amazed at such an honest and open admission from a student. (BTW, she was a contender, that year, to be in the "Royal Court" at the Rose Parade.)

What a terrible contrast it has been since I became a faculty, only to discover that most faculty, unlike that student, do not want to engage in honest and open discussions.

Worse, they are ready to throw out idiots like me who cling on to seemingly antiquated notions that education and university are about honest pursuits of truths!

It will be awesome if, for instance, a faculty meeting were devoted to the following graph (ht):

Fat chance!

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Admissions at Elite Universities

The undergraduate stratosphere gets further rarer with every passing year.

Take Stanford University's recent announcement about the class of 2014: The university reviewed 32,022 applications from "the largest number of candidates in its history," and sent offers to "just 7.2 percent" of applicants—an admission rate that "sets a university record."

Hmmm .... that means the number of students who received rejection letters from Stanford is .... aaaahhh, who cares!

I recall reading in Nicholas Lehman's article, back some time ago in the Atlantic, that the SAT score remains forever in the student's memory.  It is such a defining number of one's life at a critical fork in the road--where to after high school? I mean, think about the "Stanford rejects" given this piece of data from its class of 2013:

nearly 20 percent of the Class of 2013 posted perfect scores in the SAT Critical Reading and Math exams, and two-thirds of the class earned a GPA of 4.0 and above.

And this was the case when Stanford's admit rate was 7.9%, compared to this year's 7.2%.  Ouch!

Of course, Standford's 7.2% admit rate is bested, ahem, by that old school on the east coast: Harvard

For the first time in Harvard’s history, more than 30,000 students applied to the College, leading to an admission rate of 6.9 percent for the Class of 2014. Letters of admission (and e-mail notifications) were sent on April 1 to 2,110 of the 30,489 applicants....
... more than 3,000 applicants scored a perfect 800 on the SAT Critical Reading Test; 4,100 scored 800 on the SAT Math Test; and nearly 3,600 were ranked first in their high school classes.

93.1 percent of the applicants were rejected .... how many of them knew even beforehand that they didn't stand a chance, but applied anyway?  According to The Daily Beast, Stanford leads the way in being the most stressful environment for students :(

BTW, the average SAT scores at the "flagship" university of the system where I teach ...

SAT scores related to bathrooms in the house?

Greg Mankiw:

The NY Times Economix blog offers us the above graph, showing that kids from higher income families get higher average SAT scores.

Of course! But so what? This fact tells us nothing about the causal impact of income on test scores. (Economix does not advance a causal interpretation, but nor does it warn readers against it.)

This graph is a good example of omitted variable bias, a statistical issue discussed in Chapter 2 of my favorite textbook. The key omitted variable here is parents' IQ. Smart parents make more money and pass those good genes on to their offspring.

Suppose we were to graph average SAT scores by the number of bathrooms a student has in his or her family home. That curve would also likely slope upward. (After all, people with more money buy larger homes with more bathrooms.) But it would be a mistake to conclude that installing an extra toilet raises yours kids' SAT scores.

It would be interesting to see the above graph reproduced for adopted children only. I bet that the curve would be a lot flatter.

Hmmm..... IQ and genes. Controversial, right? Of course. Because this is an unsettled issue in science. Conor Clarke remarks that "the vaguely deterministic suggestion that smart parents "make more money and pass those good genes on to their offspring" is a laughably crude description of how real life works" and cites a study by Richard Nisbett and notes that:

children born to wealthy parents and raised by downscale families have almost exactly the same IQ range as children born to downscale parents and raised by wealthy families. Nisbett uses this to make what I thought would have been an entirely uncontroversial point -- namely, that "both genes and class-related environmental effects are powerful contributors to intelligence"

Shall watch out for the next round of this discussion :-)