The Great Acceleration

A major impact of the current virus crisis is that trends that were developing gradually have suddenly gathered new momentum. In many places around the world we can see the introduction of something like a universal basic income, the curtailment of carbon consuming transport, moves to abolish prisons and the police, and the continued rise of online education, online shopping, online almost anything.

Western universities have been facing an economic crisis for some time. Costs have soared and the supply of competent students has been drying up. For a while, the gap was filled with international, mainly Chinese, students but even before the virus that supply was dwindling. It seems likely that as universities open up, wholly or partly, there will be a lot fewer Chinese students and not many from other places. Meanwhile, local students and their parents will wonder whether there's any point in going deep into debt to pay for online or hybrid courses that will lead nowhere.

Organisations, like organisms, struggle to grow or to survive and universities need students to bring in revenue. If capable students are going to stay away then universities will have to recruit less capable students, close shop, merge, or become some other kind of institution. 

Another factor is the desperate need to calibrate the demographic composition of the student body, administration and faculty with that of the region or country or the world. Standardised testing has long been a problem here. Tests like the SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, and GMAT  are good predictors of academic ability and cognitive skills but they invariably give better scores to Whites and East Asians than to African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans.

For many years there have been repeated demands that American universities abandon objective testing for admission and placement. One element in these demands was the observation that there was a correlation between family income and test scores. This was attributed to the ability of rich white parents to provide expensive test preparation courses for their  children.

There was an element of hypocrisy in these claims. If test prep courses were the cause of racial differences why not just make them a required part of the high school curriculum or pay the test centre fees and travel costs of low-income students? The failure to propose such measures suggests that everyone knows that this is not really the cause of racial or social achievements. 

The University of California (UC), once the exemplar of public tertiary education, has now decided to remove the SAT and ACT from the admissions process. The implications of this are large. Almost certainly many other public and perhaps some private universities will follow suit. The  UC Board of Regents has announced a plan to phase out standardised testing for undergraduate students by 2025.

In 2021 and 2022 UC will be test-optional. Students can submit test scores if they wish and UC campuses may use them as they see fit.

In 2023 and 2024 UC will be test-blind. Test scores will not be used for admissions although they might be used for course placement and scholarships. If I understand it correctly test scores could still be used for the admission of out of state and international students.

In 2025 the SAT/ACT will be phased out altogether and supposedly replaced by a new test "that more closely aligns with what we expect incoming students to know to demonstrate their preparedness for UC."

I would like to emulate Wayne Rooney and declare that I will never make a prediction but I cannot resist this one: there will never be a standardised test that will reconcile the need to predict academic ability with the demand for zero or minimal disparate racial impact.

UC will most probably end up with a complicated and holistic system of admission that will try to combine a semblance of selectivity with a mix of metrics that relate to subjective and marginal traits like grit, response to adversity, social awareness and so on and which produced an acceptable mix of groups.

It is very likely that the academic competence and cognitive skills of undergraduates and postgraduates at UC campuses will go into sharp decline. No doubt there will be compensations. Students will have be grittier, more diverse, more aware. Whether that is sufficient to balance the decline in cognitive ability remains to be seen

Meanwhile in  China and India, growing political authoritarianism and centralisation may lead to some decline in academic rigour but comparison to the US and Europe that still seems fairly limited.