Who belongs at top colleges?

We're trying something different today: hosting an exchange between myself and Kelsey Piper, a writer at The Argument. A while back, Piper wrote about a report warning of high remediation rates at the University of California San Diego. This report got a great deal of attention because to some it represented deep problems in American education. I wrote a piece about why I thought the conventional narrative about this report — especially its implications for college admissions — was wrong. Because Piper and I have somewhat different views on this, we thought it would be interesting to have a direct exchange of ideas, which you'll find below. Don’t worry if you haven’t read our prior articles on this; this exchange should make sense on its own. This is being copublished with The Argument. Forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here.  ~Matt

Matt Barnum:

If a high school graduate struggles to do very basic math but manages to get good grades anyway, should they get into a good college? 

By "struggles with basic math," I mean they incorrectly answered the following: "Round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred." 

A recent University of California San Diego report, which warned of rising remedial math rates, kicked off a fevered conversation on this question. It has even prompted an inquiry from the U.S. Senate. To Kelsey Piper at The Argument, the report amounted to a searing indictment of high school grade inflation and admissions standards at the UC system: "Instead, here is the absurd image that the report slowly and painstakingly paints: A number of high schools are awarding A grades to AP Calculus students who do not have any calculus skills and who would get the lowest possible score on the AP Calculus exam if they took it."

I agree with Piper’s concerns about grade inflation, but I think she's wrong to categorically suggest that UCSD shouldn't admit students who need remedial help. 

Piper argued that such students simply aren’t benefiting from a UCSD education. Their “outcomes are not good,” and she would “not bet on” their chances of graduating. The university report made a similar argument, saying that admitting underprepared students amounted to “setting them up for failure.” 

I don’t think the evidence supports this. 

Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer studied a policy from the 2000s that admitted students to certain University of California schools, including UCSD, based on their high school grades, without considering test scores. These students are similar to those who need remediation now: They were disproportionately low-income and their SAT scores were very low compared to others on campus.

So what happened? These low-SAT students were far more likely to complete a college degree on time compared to essentially identical students who did not get a chance to attend a selective UC school. They also earned more money as young adults. Far from hurting these students, access to a top-flight UC school helped them quite a lot. If anything, they seemed to benefit more than their peers.

A naive analysis would miss this. The low-SAT students performed worse than their peers at UC, but they were more successful than they otherwise would have been had they attended a different college. Other research, including a major new study of Texas’ public universities, has found similar results. 

Piper argued that underprepared students might be better off attending a community college — isn’t that the point of such schools, to remediate gaps in high school education? Yet here, again, the evidence calls this into question. Students’ outcomes appear to be worse if they are diverted from four-year colleges to community colleges, according to a rigorous 2022 study.

This research brought into sharp relief the trade-offs in the current UCSD situation and for universities across the country at a moment when high school students are graduating with weaker academic skills.

UCSD officials have understandably warned about the new resources required by increased remediation, a point echoed by Piper. It appears to be true that the school has borne more of this burden than other UC colleges. Yet UC schools may be better equipped to expand remedial programs than community colleges and the less-selective California State system, both of which receive much less funding per student than the UCs.

UCSD has responded to concerns about remediation by intentionally reducing the number of students admitted from California’s highest-poverty public high schools, according to the remediation report. That’s one way to try to “solve” the remediation problem from an institutional perspective, but it does nothing to solve it from a societal perspective. (The report says this didn’t seem to reduce remediation rates much anyway, perhaps because it was so poorly targeted.)

Selective universities can make it their mission to admit the types of students who statistical models predict are likely to do well in college. Those are students who not only have high grades, but also high test scores, and who, on average, come from more advantaged families and high schools. In many obvious ways, this is an appealing, lucrative approach for colleges. 

Another option, though, is for selective colleges to focus at least part of their efforts on admitting students who are likely to benefit from a well-resourced education but may not otherwise get it. I recognize there are trade-offs here. Part of the point of elite universities is to pull together the most talented people to spur innovative thinking. Some of the benefits of selective colleges may come from peer effects. I don’t purport to answer the complex, value-laden question about how precisely universities should design their admission standards.

But Piper's argument didn’t wrestle with these trade-offs and discards high-potential students who could benefit from extra support in college.

Kelsey Piper:

I think this is a pretty fair objection, and I want to try to say something more nuanced about how I think the UCSD admissions dynamics cause harm to see whether there’s remaining disagreement.

On the prospects at university of underprepared students, my read of the literature on this is that it’s very mixed: some studies have found that the marginal student admitted to a better university is better off for it and would be less likely to get a degree if they were rejected and went to a lower-tier school. But others have found that, particularly in STEM subjects and comparing among UCs, the opposite is true: “less prepared minority students at top ranked campuses would have higher science graduation rates had they attended lower ranked campuses.” 

Neither of these is an exact match for UCSD’s situation, because I would argue that a student who can’t do elementary school math isn’t a marginal admit so much as a mistaken admit: the problem is that the school was badly wrong about applicant ability. 

What I should have done was be more specific about the various kinds of harms that I think result from test-free admissions combined with extreme grade inflation:

First, I think the other students at UCSD are harmed. A lot of the benefits of top-ranked colleges come from that college’s reputation on the job market. If that college ceases to have a reputation for producing capable graduates, this is a harm to all of its other capable graduates. As Barnum acknowledged, there are probably also peer effects, though it’s a bit hard to guess their magnitude.

This leads me to the second group that is harmed: students who should have been admitted to UCSD but were not. We all agree that attending UCSD relative to a weaker school is a huge benefit — so much so that it may be beneficial even if the student isn’t prepared. UCSD rejects most applicants, so for every applicant accepted on the basis of misleading good grades who would not have been accepted with full information, someone else was turned away, and was harmed.

The third group is students who are failed by unaccountable high schools. When students are being accepted to top colleges, high schools proudly advertise that fact and use it to persuade more students to enroll. Parents mistakenly think that these admissions mean that the high school is preparing their child for college and students mistakenly think that their good grades mean they are mastering the material expected of them.

I don’t actually think college admissions is the ideal place for this “moment of truth,” but if college admissions rewards high schools for inflated grades and for systematically failing to educate their students, that makes it even harder to fix. After all, from the perspective of the high school, why fix what isn’t broken? On the whole, I suspect more kids will get a poor education in high school if we sever links between good education and good outcomes.

The fourth group that is harmed are students who get into UCSD who are unprepared for college. While it's possible that these students are better off than if they had gone to a less selective university, I think they’re certainly harmed relative to the world in which they were adequately prepared for college. My read of the evidence is that in STEM, they probably aren’t better off, but I agree that I overstated the case here, and different papers have drawn different conclusions.

Even if they are better off as a result of their admission, I don’t think continued test-free admissions is the right policy. If we think that the UCs can maintain their current excellent reputation, rigor, and top-tier educational opportunities while serving more children, we should intentionally grow their student body until we get to the point where that is no longer true. I’m unsure whether that point would be “near the current admissions threshold” or at some very different threshold, and it might depend on whether we’re discussing STEM or non-STEM programs. 

Growing the UCs is the positive-sum solution; removing the tests and then admitting students blindly based on faked grades cannot possibly be the best way to do right by California students. 

Matt Barnum:

I appreciate this thoughtful response. We agree that grade inflation is a problem, that American K-12 schools can and should improve, and that different admissions schemes will inevitably come with trade-offs.

On the research, I also agree that there remain some debates within the literature. (In addition, I would add that the research on test-optional and test-blind admissions is underdeveloped.) That said, claims of “mismatch” effects for undergraduates have been credibly challenged.

My read is that the weight of the evidence suggests that marginal students benefit from attending more selective, better-resourced colleges, even if they are toward the bottom of their class. 

I don’t know that researchers have nailed down the precise mechanism here, but an obvious potential one is resources. Higher education is structured such that more selective schools tend to spend much more on their students’ education. Access to this sort of education is typically rationed based on students’ academic credentials, like grades, test scores, and the high school attended. 

This correlates — not perfectly, but strongly — with family wealth. Affluent students tend to go to much more elite schools. This has changed very little in recent years, despite efforts to increase economic diversity. In this sense, the academically rich and actually rich tend to get richer through the quality of their college.

Yet students of all sorts seem to benefit from a better-funded education, which is not terribly surprising. Your suggestion that we grow UCSD’s student body until we get to the point where the marginal admit to UCSD is not better off is eminently sensible. This has profound implications beyond the narrow debate over using tests in college admissions, though. I suspect that a vast swath of California students would benefit from the better-resourced education that is, at the moment, only available to a small subset.

Of course, in the real world, resources are finite, and it’s the job of admissions officers to admit and reject students. I’m just not convinced all those valuable seats at UCSD and elsewhere should be rationed based on who is already likely to succeed rather than who could succeed with extra help. 

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