Academic Selection and Regression to the Mean
In earlier posts I referred to the apparent oddity of administrators, parents, teachers, and researchers campaigning against the use of standardized tests like the SAT, GRE or LSAT in selection for universities and employment. Such people almost certainly rose to high positions in academia and elsewhere largely or partly through their performance on such tests, which are essentially measures of mental ability. Why then should they deny to others, including perhaps their own children, the opportunities that they themselves have enjoyed?
Similarly, the campaign against selection for secondary education in Britain was led by academics and supported by broad sections of the educated middles class who had benefited disproportionately from meritocratic education. I can remember my surprise on learning that the first area in the United Kingdom to abolish selection and send all secondary school students, except those whose parents could afford private education, to comprehensive schools was not a socialist stronghold in South Wales or Tyneside but the solidly suburban middle class county of Hertfordshire. Today the one place in the United Kingdom where selective secondary education survives is the thoroughly proletarian province of Northern Ireland
Looking around the net recently I found a remarkable and widespread dislike for the standardized testing of intelligence in education. Some objections are not entirely unjustified but others seem to be dramatically off the mark. There are, for example, many criticisms of the American SAT aptitude tests but the one that stands out is that they are socially and economically biased towards those who can afford expensive coaching programmes. This was a reason given by the head of Sarah Lawrence College in New York, whose tuition fees are close to those of the Ivy League.
But nobody as far as I know has seriously suggested that we admit everybody to exactly the university or give him or her exactly the job that they want. Nor is anyone proposing to introduce admission or appointment by wholesale lottery. One way or another, in any conceivable world, there will be some sort of selection for secondary schooling and even more so for higher education. If not on the basis of measurable cognitive skills then it will be done some other way. This might be through tests of achievement in academic subjects, personality traits, interviews, recommendations of secondary school teachers and counsellors, personal essays or tests of political loyalty.
The problem – and for some it might not really be a problem at all – is that any feasible alternative to the SAT is ultimately far more dependent on parental ability to pay, or perhaps somebody’s ability to pay. So, it would seem strange that the opponents of the SAT should in effect be advocating a method or methods of selection that would seemingly be against the best interest of their children, who would surely have acquired the intelligence of their parents and would deny them the opportunity for success and prosperity enjoyed by those parents.
No doubt many academics are childless and many are unmarried. But surely there are enough who would have some concern for their children. The desire to provide for the future welfare of children is the most fundamental in human nature and history. Virtually every society goes through a stage of hereditary monarchy and even republics like North Korea and the USA show a strong inclination to presidential filialism. That American and European academics and other beneficiaries of selection should be so lacking in such a basic and widespread human impulse seems very odd. Why should they be immune to something so constant and universal?
The question becomes even more pointed if we consider that well educated liberal middle class parents in North America and Europe do in fact go to immense efforts to provide their children with the attributes that appear to be valued by prestigious schools and universities. Immense effort is expected to get children into good schools and universities, even good kindergartens, to transport them to resume – compliant volunteering and athletics, to provide a variety of tuition and counseling. We even see the middle class Marxists (probably post – or neo- by now) of the Labour Party gritting their teeth and showing up for Sunday services to get their children into a church school.
Why then are so many in the middle classes so hostile to standardized tests that would allow their children at little cost to have access to valuable educational and occupational opportunities while driving themselves to the edge of bankruptcy and exhaustion to provide their children with the skills and socialization needed to gain entrance to elite institutions and to succeed academically and socially.
There is, in fact, more to the story than this and that is something called regression to the mean.
Basically, this involves the simple and obvious principle that extremes are more unusual than mediocrity. There are fewer very tall people and very short people than people of medium height. There are fewer very intelligent and very unintelligent people than people of average intelligence and so for almost any human attribute you can think of.
Another simple and obvious principle is that if any trait is wholly or largely inherited genetically then parents who have that trait to an extreme will have it to a greater degree than their offspring who in turn will have it more than the general population. To illustrate, very tall people will have children who are taller than average but not as tall as their parents. Typically, Harvard graduates will occasionally have children who will get into Harvard but more will be only bright enough for Duke, Cornell or a middling liberal arts college.
Or, to go off at a bit of a tangent, musical, literary and athletic ability are significantly inherited. But rarely do supreme achievers pass all their abilities to their children. Zack Starr, Ziggy Marley, Julian Lennon, Nancy Sinatra, Martin Amis, Auberon Waugh, Marvin Frazier, and all those Bachs are better than average but certainly very inferior to their fathers.
Backing up a little, let’s go through these points. The SAT measures intelligence quite well. So does the GRE and LSAT. Intelligence is the single most important factor in academic and career success. Many of the people who control American higher education today and have dominant position in the corporate and government hierarchies do so in large part because standardized tests could identify and measure their intelligence.
Intelligence is overwhelmingly, perhaps even, excluding environmental trauma, almost entirely hereditary. But precisely because of this persons who are extremely intelligent will never be able to pass all of their advantage to their children.
I suspect that for many professors of education, university administrators and so on there must have been traumatic moments when they realised that their children were never going to be quite as clever as they were. Perhaps it was trouble with maths or science in science in high school or perhaps the results of a trial SAT. It would be very tempting to conclude that standardized tests were an inadequate basis for judging intelligence, that it could not be defined anyway, that there were different kinds of intelligence, that other qualities were required to succeed in life, that holistic assessment could find hidden reserves of ability.
Also no doubt, we would find such people investing large amounts of time and money in tuition classes, summer camp, courses in writing admission essays and so on. To meet the opaque and unstable demands of a holistic admissions process ultimately demands more time and money that swotting for a few tests.
It is likely that more and more colleges and universities will follow Sarah Lawrence College to drop the SAT and replace it with expensive holistic selection. The cognitive elite thus will to some extent succeed in passing on its social advantages to its offspring. There will be a price. The cognitive elite will become an elite of sensitivity, personality and political correctness.
The current war against academic selection and standardized testing and the drive for holistic and alternative admissions, school based assessment, course work in place of exams is then in part an attempt by a newly arrived elite to trade in its intellectual superiority for extreme and expensive socialization.
There is nothing unusual about this. Throughout history new elites have tried to ensure the prosperity of the offspring by creating status systems that will favour those who will benefit from elaborate training and socialization. A case in point would be the uncouth entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution who turned their children into expensively educated gentlemen and ladies.
I would like to propose a general law of social development. Any group that rises to power and affluence through a quality that is substantially hereditable will endeavor to change the social system to ensure that its children will succeed them despite the remorseless logic of regression to the mean.
There are no doubt other forces that contribute to the loathing for standardized tests, such as the need to compensate African-Americans for generations of discrimination. But the war on testing and for holistic selection is in large part a device for the perpetuation of class privilege. There is nothing progressive about it.
