Pinker: "The Ivy League Is Broken and Only Standardized Tests Can Fix It"
09/05/2014
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In The New Republic, current Harvard professor Steven Pinker responds to former Columbia professor William Deresiewicz’s TNR article “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” (which I briefly responded to here.) I was glad to see that Pinker includes several references to the research of one of my favorites, Caroline Hoxby.

HIGHER ED SEPTEMBER 4, 2014

The Trouble With Harvard The Ivy League is broken and only standardized tests can fix it

The most-read article in the history of this magazine is not about war, politics, or great works of art. It’s about the admissions policies of a handful of elite universities, most prominently my employer, Harvard, which is figuratively and literally immolated on the cover.

It’s not surprising that William Deresiewicz’s “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” has touched a nerve. Admission to the Ivies is increasingly seen as the bottleneck to a pipeline that feeds a trickle of young adults into the remaining lucrative sectors of our financialized, winner-take-all economy. And their capricious and opaque criteria have set off an arms race of credential mongering that is immiserating the teenagers and parents (in practice, mostly mothers) of the upper middle class. …

But the biggest problem is that the advice in Deresiewicz’s title is perversely wrongheaded. If your kid has survived the application ordeal and has been offered a place at an elite university, don’t punish her for the irrationalities of a system she did nothing to create; by all means send her there! The economist Caroline Hoxby has shown that selective universities spend twenty times more on student instruction, support, and facilities than less selective ones, while their students pay for a much smaller fraction of it, thanks to gifts to the college. Because of these advantages, it’s the selective institutions that are the real bargains in the university marketplace. Holding qualifications constant, graduates of a selective university are more likely to graduate on time, will tend to find a more desirable spouse, and will earn 20 percent more than those of less selective universities—every year for the rest of their working lives. These advantages swamp any differences in tuition and other expenses, which in any case are often lower than those of less selective schools because of more generous need-based financial aid. The Ivy admissions sweepstakes may be irrational, but the parents and teenagers who clamber to win it are not.

I was going to go through the rest of the article and excerpt the good parts for you, but it’s all good. It’s endlessly quotable, so go read the whole thing there.

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