I had a professor in grad school who had studied how admissions inputs correlated to various measures of success (which is of course a fraught subject of uts own). This was a while back though I assume not much as changed. As I recall, standardized tests followed by some sort of adjusted class rank were the best predictors while a lot of the softer stuff like interviews and letters of recommendation were pretty close to worthless. I expect schools could drop some of the more time-consuming softer stuff with very little impact on the admissions process.

In MIT's case it probably is especially important to assess certain types of skills, because someone who doesn't have a reasonable math background for example is going to have a bad time. (Though problems doing math is a surprisingly common theme in higher ed including at the grad level--even with programs you wouldn't think were especially quantitative.)

> while a lot of the softer stuff like interviews and letters of recommendation were pretty close to worthless

It’s telling we’re seeing testing attacked while these are preserved.

It’s not a mistake, that’s for sure. I’ll be more blunt since a lot of other comments in this thread beat around the bush: higher education institutes are removing objective admissions criteria so that they can admit less qualified minorities on subjective grounds.

the question is, why? why are they doing it? the real reason not the ostensible one.

> question is, why?

Discretionary admissions with social goals turns the university, and its administrators, into institutions with broad public remit.

Probably three reasons:

1) They're trying to get ahead of a Supreme Court ruling, which will likely rule Ivies are discriminating against Asian candidates.

2) Elite cultural zeitgeist is in favor of discriminating against Asian and non-elite white candidates.

3) More subtly, the top Ivy admins are overwhelmingly Jewish, and they've likely received push back from Jewish alumni/donors, as Asians have displaced smart-but-unremarkable Jewish candidates. A recent Tablet article alluded to Asians displacing Jewish candidates, which has been an unreported theme in the Ivies over the last 20 years.

Those three things are driving much of it.

Money presumably. There's an extremely strong incentive for educational institutions to spend their long term reputation on short term financial gain by setting high fees and giving everyone a high grade. Basically everyone loves it except people who already graduated.

And maybe employers, but employers tend to do their own tests because of the difficulty of comparing external test results across time and institutions.

Employers used to have standardized tests for all sorts of things. The tests enabled a lot of upward mobility for people to pursue occupations that did not require college degree. If you could show aptitude in a test and had at least a high school education, they'd take you on and train you and you'd have a nice career.

However, certain groups sued saying that "equality of outcome" is more important than "equality of opportunity". They argued that if the outcome of a test showed intersectional differences, then the test must be biased. They succeeded in pressuring the various trade groups and industries to get rid of the tests or be sued into oblivion.

The trade groups that offered these tests realized it was just easier to require college degrees as a proxy instead of having their own specific tests and having to deal with these pressure groups. This is why many occupations these days require a degree when it seems like that should be unnecessary.

This slammed the door to upward mobility for many that the pressure groups were claiming to try to help.

Or, what a private employer tested was not necessarily a fair standardized test, given they are a private entity that could do whatever they wanted, not part of the public education system that has to adhere to all kinds of annoying standards.

Just because something claims to be fair doesn't mean it is.

Can you provide references for this story?

It was a Supreme Court case, Griggs vs Duke Power, in 1970. Since then, employers cannot use IQ tests or standardized tests, since they were deemed discriminatory against minorities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

This case says something different though. It says you can’t use a test that doesn’t relate to the job, regardless of if there’s intent to discriminate or not.

A standardized test that tests your ability to do the job is still allowable — presumably even if minorities fare worse on it.

This case is the whole reason the "disparate impact" phrase exists and its had a chilling effect on employment testing. If you're a large FANG company hiring programmers, you risk testing (validating someone can write code), but if you don't have the pocketbook and legal team, there is not much incentive to put your company at legal risk of being sued. This is especially true when you can just use "college degree in X required" as an extremely inefficient and costly proxy for what could have been a test. And we wonder why tuition is so high.

But even small tech companies do coding tests. I don't think its a function of large pocketbooks. Rather I think that they found tests that correlate more to the work done on the actual job.

This misses the point. The point is that the process is the punishment. The process is that these groups will sue over and over again until you give in.

That story doesn’t say that at all. You brought in your own baggage to make that claim.

If you read the explanation I do think that makes sense in that they are very clear that it is specifically the _math_ portion of the SAT/ACT where they see the value. And generally I agree with that, especially as a threshold (as opposed to a fine ranking).

It was similar when I applied to grad school (this was engineering). They told us pretty unequivocally that getting a perfect GRE math score was pretty much required, but that the verbal went right in the bin, so don't worry about it.

It makes sense for engineering focused schools or those applying to engineering schools. I'm still less convinced places like Harvard where a good chunk of the students won't take a ultra-difficult math class during their time there has much use in the SATs. At least in the "I got a 1580 on my SATs but someone with a 1570 got in over me, how is that fair?" Kind of way.

As an aside, that is so well written, and I love the use of inline citations that expand right where the reader is versus jumping to the bottom. It feels so natural that I wish all publications did that.