Back in the 1960s the favorite target of Alabama governor George Wallace during his presidential campaigns was “pointy-headed bureaucrats with thin briefcases full of guidelines.” One can only imagine what he would think about the heads and briefcases of the new breed of bureaucrats who devised the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”
The Compact is the latest shot across the bow in the Trump administration’s assault on higher education. On October 1 nine universities were sent letters with a memo listing conditions for institutions to receive priority in federal funding.
The nine universities reportedly include three members of the Ivy League (Brown, Dartmouth, Penn); three other prestigious private universities (MIT, Southern Cal, Vanderbilt); and three flagship public universities (Arizona, Virginia, and UT-Austin). Why those nine were selected (or targeted) is not clear, but in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, May Mailman, senior adviser for special projects at the White House, described them as “potential good actors,” with a “president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education.” Unlike all the other universities that don’t care about “higher-quality education,” presumably.
Calling the memo a “compact” is an interesting choice of words, a potential triple-entendre. Is it a compact as in “formal agreement,” a play on the verb that means compress or squash, or a device that attempts to cover up that which is ugly?
Some of the conditions laid out in the compact, such as freezing tuition for five years and ending grade inflation, are hard to oppose. Others, such as the mandate to limit international students to no more than 15 percent of the student body, will spark debate about whether they serve or hurt the national interest.
Still others seem to contradict themselves. The compact calls on universities to “Ensure a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus” but also requires them to shut down departments that punish, belittle or spark violence against conservative ideas. Does that mean that non-conservative ideas are still fair game for punishment or belittling? Under the conditions laid out in the memo, institutions wouldn’t take stands on societal issues and would restrict individual employees from exercising their free speech rights to express political opinions.
I’ll leave it to others to analyze the entirety of the compact. I want to focus on and dig deeper into the very first bullet point in the compact, “Equality in Admissions.”
The memo takes aim at what it calls “discriminatory” admissions policies, stating “Treating certain groups as categorically incapable of performing–and therefore in need of preferential treatment–perpetuates a dangerous badge of inferiority, destroys confidence, and does nothing to identify or solve the most pressing challenges for aspiring young people.” I hope that statement is intended to call out those who want to label certain groups of faculty hires or admitted students as beneficiaries of DEI policies.
Alas, the more likely intent is to cast aspersions on efforts to increase access and opportunity for traditionally underrepresented groups. Colleges are certainly open to criticism to the extent that they reverse engineered the admission process to sculpt classes with a particular mix of students, the essence of Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion in SFFA v Harvard, but accusing them of believing that “certain groups” are “categorically” incapable of “performing” is a gross misrepresentation, a straw man argument. A more reasonable interpretation would be that colleges believed that the metrics used in admission didn’t accurately predict how “certain groups” were capable of performing.
According to the memo, universities will not consider the following factors, or proxies for them: sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious associations. It allows “due exceptions” for religiously-affiliated and single-sex institutions, presumably only for religion and gender rather than having free rein with the other factors.
The compact calls for admission decisions “based upon and evaluated against objective criteria published on the university website.” That would seem to be a veiled call for universities to adopt a formulaic admission process rather than using holistic review. Holistic review can certainly be maddenly frustrating for applicants (and counselors) because there is no way to know why one applicant is admitted and another isn’t, but most people don’t believe that personal qualities should be irrelevant in admission.
The notion that admission decisions can somehow be measured against objective criteria reveals a thorough misunderstanding of selective admission. Take grade point average as one example. How do you compare two identical GPAs for students coming from different high schools with different grading scales and grade distributions? More to the point, say you have two students from the same high school with the same transcript and same GPA. One worked hard to produce her grades while the other succeeded with minimal effort. Which of the two has more merit, the one who is maximizing her ability or the one who has fuel left in the tank? And which is more deserving? Are those the same thing? Those questions become much more complex when dealing with applicant pools where three times as many students may be superbly qualified for admission as there are spaces available.
The most perplexing aspect of the section related to admission is the requirement that “institutions shall have all undergraduate applicants take a widely-used standardized test (i.e. SAT, ACT, CLT). What’s behind the reverence for testing? Has the College Board invested in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture? Are there SAT score reports in the Epstein files?
The compact’s focus on test scores assigns an authority to standardized testing that is unwarranted. The SAT was originally marketed as a test of aptitude, but today SAT is a brand rather than an acronym. The appeal of both the SAT and ACT has always been their false precision, a way to simply categorize a complex individual as a “1350” or a “29.” But the standard error of measurement (approximately 30 points for the SAT and 3 for the ACT) means that there is little meaningful statistical difference across a range of scores.
That precision is further compromised by the impact of test prep. To return to our GPA examples from above, if two students have identical scores on the SAT, but one spent hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on coaching to achieve that score while the other didn’t, do the scores mean the same thing? Which student possesses more merit?
The SAT was originally designed to assist, in conjunction with high school grades, predicting freshman-year college grades. Nicholas Lemann’s book, The Big Test, points out that as early as 1960 the president of the College Board stated that the SAT should be used as a tool for guidance, not selection. Today there is debate about how much predictive value is added by test scores. Many colleges and universities see test scores as having little added value, whereas Dartmouth returned to requiring scores because internal research determined that test scores were more accurate predictors of student performance at Dartmouth than grades.
The testing mandate implies that test-optional admission policies are proxies for race. But the test-optional movement is more than 50 years old, dating back to its origins at places like Bates and Bowdoin. The rapid growth in test-optional colleges was driven by students not being able to test during the pandemic. Many institutions discovered that test scores didn’t make much of a difference in whom, or how well, they admitted.
The ultimate issue with having colleges require all applicants to submit standardized test scores is that it restricts freedom for both institutions and individuals. At the same time we’re no longer requiring children to be vaccinated against things like measles and whooping cough in order to go to school, we’re going to force them to take admission tests to go to college? Colleges and universities, particularly those that are private, should have the freedom to determine what their admission requirements will be. Students should have the right to decide whether or not to submit test scores.
While we’re on the subject, requiring test scores from all applicants qualifies as an unfunded mandate as well as a tax on families with children applying to college. If the federal government is going to mandate testing, it should pay for the tests.
Not only are the new breed of bureaucrats are far more pointy-headed than their predecessors, they also just don’t get the point.