This morning's article in The New York Times about how hyper-selectivity at the top schools has elevated the status of "second-tier" schools, because students who once could have gotten into Harvard or MIT or Stanford now find themselves at Lehigh or Rochester, got a whole lot wrong.
It's true that a demographic bump --the children of the baby boomers--means there are more applicants to college than when I applied to be a member of the Class of 1992. But it's a long way from that simple fact to the assertion, made throughout the Times article, that there are way more top students today. The idea is absurd on the face of it: as the United States continues to lag other advanced countries in every meaningful international academic test, as our
inner-city schools continue to fail, how could it be that there are millions more elite students? Only a very bizarre distribution of academic talent could account for this, some version of what's happening with wealth: has the middle disappeared, crowding all students into the ends of the bell curve? So that there are more failing students than ever, but also more brilliant students?
That's absurd. It's true that SAT scores have jumped, although the Times never makes clear how much of the gain is due to the re-norming of scores a decade ago. Even adjusting for the re-norming, millions of students now take SAT prep classes, so of course they're doing better. Grade inflation in our high schools would account for much of the appearance of improvement. And a more competitive environment, exacerbated by ultra-competitive parents, surely means that more students have resumes crowded with extra-curricular activities.
But does that mean students are better?
Hardly. Not if by "better" we mean better read in the classics of literature, or conversant in more
languages, or able to write more clearly. My work with students at a number of top schools in recent years (Stanford, Yale, Wesleyan) confirms that while they are indeed savvier than ever about what the post-graduation job market will hold, and while they are more attentive to their resumes, they are no more likely to come across as deeply learned or intellectual. If they did, how would we account for that? Would there be some secret success story of American secondary education that the media have failed to notice?
A final point: the Times does not pay nearly enough attention in this article to the effect of the Common Application. Numerous schools that used to require students to fill out a specialized application, meant just for that school, now allow students simply to have their Common Application sent to the school. Applying to Yale, for example, used to mean filling out a separate application. Now, any student who is already using the "Common App" can use it for Yale. So why not apply to some Ivies too, as long as you have a few more bucks for application fees? Thus top-tier schools have seen a huge artificial inflation in their application numbers (with a corresponding drop in their acceptance rates). But many of these are junk applications, sent by students with no chance of getting in--and with parents who wouldn't dream of their children's not applying.