Several colleges have made headlines this year with their decision to reinstate ACT or SAT test scores as an undergraduate admission requirement.
Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, and Caltech have decided to once again require test scores. In March, the University of Texas ended its pandemic-era test-optional policy and resumed requiring standardized test scores as part of the application process. Other public universities are considering following suit or have already done so.
The usual justifications for resuming the test requirement is that it helps predict future academic success and can identify talented applicants from under-resourced backgrounds.
Claims that standardized tests can find well-qualified candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds, serving like some kind of a diamond-in-the-rough detector, may be true. And, while many observers remain skeptical, schools that have become convinced by that logic may be able to use the tests to yield socioeconomically and racially diverse entering classes.
However, there’s a flip side to this issue. For every traditionally underserved applicant given a boost by a good test score, innumerable others will be overlooked because they lacked the resources to prep for the tests or their scores fail to reflect their true academic abilities.
As Akil Bello, the Senior Director of Advocacy for FairTest noted, universities “can trot out the heart-warming story of the rare successful graduate ‘saved’ by the test, (but) they do not publicize the countless individual narratives of deserving, capable, hard-working low income students whose college dreams were snuffed by standardized testing.”
Selective universities can use standardized tests if the want, but if they’re genuinely dedicated to being institutions of opportunity, they need to supplement those tests with other strategies intended to find, recruit and nurture talented students who risk being overlooked, discouraged or disqualified by too much reliance on the SAT/ACT.
Fortunately, that strategy exists in the form of a game-changing national program that enrolls high school students from low-income neighborhoods in credit-bearing college courses taught by faculty at several of the nation’s most highly regarded universities.
It’s the National Education Equity Lab, an education justice nonprofit that I’ve written about before. Founded in 2019 by Leslie Cornfeld, a former federal civil rights prosecutor and advisor to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and two U.S. Secretaries of Education, the Lab has become one of the nation’s leading models for preparing low-income and traditionally underserved students to enroll and succeed in college.
It’s the first to do so at scale, helping fill the college pipeline with talented students who might have otherwise never have believed they could succeed at college. College admission offices seem to agree. Richard Shaw, dean of admissions and financial aid at Stanford University, said he thought the program would “become one of the most important models in the nation to introduce admissions offices to incredible students they wouldn't otherwise find and to introduce those students to incredible colleges they would otherwise not consider.”
A first of its kind, here’s how the Lab works.
School districts serving students in low-income high schools are invited to participate. Principals pick the high school teachers who assist college faculty in offering the course, and they also select the students - typically about 25 per course.
Many Ed Equity Lab high schools offer multiple courses – meaning students can graduate having completed a semester or more of transferable credits, resulting in substantial tuition savings.
Students - typically juniors and seniors - are selected on the basis of their academic record and teachers’ nominations. The courses are offered as dual enrollment classes, allowing students to earn both college and high school credit. They’re taught by college faculty members, who deliver the lectures asynchronously via video, and hold office hours via Zoom and are assisted by high school teachers who co-teach the course during the school day.
Graduate or undergraduate students are an important part of the mix, functioning as teaching assistants who lead a weekly live discussion section via Zoom and help with course grading.
Ed Equity Lab onboards the schools and universities, conducts orientations and training for the teachers and teaching assistants, and organizes career and college advising sessions. You can watch a brief introduction to the Ed EquityLab by Cornfeld and others and listen to some former students describe their experiences here.
The courses are free for students, and the universities provide them to the Lab at cost. School districts pay $250 per student per class, a highly discounted rate made possible by the universities’ commitment to the effort and the contributions the Lab receives from private donors.
Since starting in 2019, the program has scaled up quickly. It’s now served over 25,000 students, 10,000 just this year. It’s in 132 school districts across 33 states. The Lab’ goal is to reach more than one million students over the next ten years.
The curriculum has expanded as well, with 31 credit-bearing courses this year. For example, students can enroll in an Introduction to Computer Science by Stanford’s Patrick Young, Environmental Studies from Howard professor Janelle Burke, or a psychology course taught by University of Pennsylvania Professor Angela Duckworth.
“Our students have demonstrated that talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not,’’ said Cornfeld. Over 80% of students completing a Lab course pass it. Many students take pass multiple classes, giving them a strong start on their college degrees.
If the rationale for standardized tests is that they predict college success, passing Ed Equity Lab courses goes one step better — it’s not a prediction, it’s a confirmation of college readiness. Rather than relying on a fallible proxy of future college performance, why not test students’ ability in a real college class. The Lab’s growing list of college partners understands that and are using more holistic reviews of candidates from under-resourced communities.
The roster of universities now participating in the Ed Equity Lab includes Princeton, Stanford, Georgetown, Cornell, Wesleyan University, Barnard, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Spelman College, Morehouse College, Brown University, all campuses in the University of California, Howard University, and Arizona State University.
However, the question remains — why aren’t even more prominent colleges and universities taking part in the program? For example, most of the 140 institutions in the American Talent Initiative are struggling to reach the ATI goal of enrolling 50,000 more Pell Grant recipients by 2025. Given the Lab’s proven success in building talent pipelines for exactly the kinds of students ATI aims to educate, more ATI institutions should consider partnering with it.
If colleges see a decline in the socioeconomic and racial diversity of their incoming classes this fall — as many observers are expecting — they’ll have plenty of factors to blame, including themselves.
Start with the Supreme Court ban on race-conscious admissions and then add in the botched roll-out of the revised FASFA (Free Application for Student Federal Aid form that’s compromised timely financial aid offers for so many low-income students. Further complicating the problem is legislation in many states prohibiting a wide range of diversity-equity-inclusion activities that helped attract students from underserved backgrounds.
While those factors are no doubt important, they don’t tell the whole story. Universities that are resuming standardized testing are likely to see less student diversity in their entering classes whether they want to admit it or not. That’s particularly true for those who cling to legacy and donor preferences at the same time.
Almost all of the nation’s best institutions say they’re committed to educating qualified students from all backgrounds. If they really mean it, they’ll need to supplement their admissions polices — whether test-optional, test-blind or test-required — with new forms of student outreach and assessment. Programs like the Ed Equity Lab are perfectly situated to address that need. The real question is whether colleges will get on board or will they be satisfied with a return to business-as-usual admissions.
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May 23, 2024 at 05:00PM
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Colleges Reinstating The ACT/SAT Should Add A Program Like This Too - Forbes
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