126. The SAT measures nothing important
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
Here’s the essential truth: The only reported correlation between the SAT scores of a seventeen-year-old student and the success or happiness of that student when he’s thirty is a double counting of how the brand name of a famous college helped him get a better job early on. Double count? Sure. Because normalizing for the fame of the college in the short run, lousy SAT scores lead to just as much (if not more) life happiness, income, leadership ability, etc.
The circular reasoning, of course, is that the fame of college determines the number of students who apply, which determines the “selectivity” (carefully put in quotes), which raises the typical SAT score of incoming students.
Kiplinger’s, normally a reality-based magazine, ranked the fifty “best” private universities in the USA. The criteria were: admissions rate, freshman and graduating senior retention rate, and students per faculty member.
As we’ve seen, the admissions rate is nothing but a measure of how famous the college is, how good it is at getting applications. That’s the key reason that so many middle-level (there’s that ranking again) colleges spend a fortune on high school outreach. They do direct-mail campaigns to boost applications which boosts their statistics which boost their ratings which lead to more applications because they are now famous.
What about retention rate? Well, if a school tells its students the truth and gives them tools to proceed and succeed in the real world, you’d imagine that more of those students would leave to go join the real world, no? If retention rate is a key metric on the agenda of a university’s leadership, I wouldn’t be surprised to see grade inflation, amazing facilities, and most of all, an insulation from what will be useful in the real world. Why leave? Indeed, how can you leave?
To be clear, it’s entirely likely that some students will find a dramatic benefit from four years of college. Or six. Or perhaps three. But measuring retention as a way of deciding if a college is doing a good job is silly—if students are leaving early, I’d like to know where they’re going. If they are leaving to do productive work and are satisfied with what they’ve learned, I put that down as a win, not a failure.
The most surprising irony of all is that the average debt load of a student leaving the top fifty schools on graduation is less than $30,000. Princeton, ranked first, has an average debt of less than $6,000. No, the famous schools aren’t saddling their graduates with a lifetime of debt, one that’s crippling. In fact, it’s the second-, third-, and fourth-tier schools that lack the resources to offer aid that do this.
The lesser-ranked schools are less famous, net out to be more expensive (less aid), and, because many of them struggle to be on the list of the top fifty, offer none of the character-stretching that Loren Pope so relished.
A trap, caused by the power of marketing and the depth of insecurity among well-meaning parents raised in an industrial world.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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