People concerned about the fairness of college admissions are seizing on a new study from Stanford’s Center for Education and Policy Analysis to argue that colleges should keep using standardized tests to decide who gets in. During the pandemic, some 60% of U.S. colleges made submission of test scores optional.
“Hey let’s dump the SAT bc the rest of the admissions process is so equitable,” tweeted Susan Dynarski, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Michigan. She followed the tweet with an eye-roll emoji.
The 26-page study, “Essay Content is Strongly Related to Household Income and SAT Scores,” appears to support the idea that in addition to scoring consistently above their low-income counterparts on the SAT, students from high-income households submit essays that are more likely to secure them a spot at a selective college. Reported family income is an even better predictor of essay quality than of test scores, according to the study.
“Results show that essays have a stronger correlation to reported household income than SAT scores,” says the study’s abstract. “Efforts to realize more equitable college admissions protocols can be informed by attending to how social class is encoded in non-numerical components of applications.”
But the study has led many readers to an ill-informed conclusion, say admissions aficionados. In a Twitter thread about the study, Paul Tough, author of The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us, says: “It turns out rich kids use more commas and colons. Poor kids use more verbs and pronouns. Rich kids write about physics and China. Poor kids write about family members and helping others. Cool findings. But.”
He continues: “This paper tells us absolutely nothing about how those tendencies correlate with admissions decisions.”
William Conley, who spent his 40-year career in admissions and enrollment management at Johns Hopkins, Case Western and Bucknell, agrees. Everyone in the admissions world knows that rich families pay as much as $1,000 an hour to consultants who edit and ghost write essays. Readers can identify such writing in seconds. Words like “plethora” are a giveaway, he says. “They should just use ‘a lot.’”
Admissions officers care much more about grades, course rigor and test scores than they do about essays. A science or math student with a strong record and high scores is unlikely to be rejected because they write a weak essay, says Conley. And a top-notch essay submitted by a weak student is seen as a red flag. “A great essay is not going to mean a school will take somebody who doesn’t measure up academically in performance,” he says, “nor the reverse.”
What’s more, the six academics who wrote the paper, including Mount Holyoke assistant sociology professor Ben Gebre-Medhin, made no attempt to quantify how essays are weighted by admissions offices. “No one knows,” says Gebre-Medhin, who was doing his post-doc at Stanford when work on the paper started.
The authors used software to analyze essays written by nearly 60,000 applicants to the University of California system in 2016. They turned words and phrases into numbers, identifying syntax, word and punctuation choices and correlating those with reported household income. They also looked at essay topics. Lower income students tended to write more about family relationships and school challenges like time management.
That’s not news, says Conley. He adds that many people who read the study are misinformed about how colleges process application essays. “Only 2%-3% of students go to schools that admit fewer than 30% of their applicants,” he says. The other 97%-plus schools hardly count the essay in their admission decision. “This is a first world problem,” he says. “It’s a champagne problem.”
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What A New Study On College Essays And Family Income Really Means - Forbes
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