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Why Focusing Too Narrowly in College Could Backfire; Students are told learn the subjects that will best land them a job when they graduate. But that could be the worst thing they could do
November 11, 2013 Leave a comment
Why Focusing Too Narrowly in College Could Backfire
Students are told learn the subjects that will best land them a job when they graduate. But that could be the worst thing they could do.
Updated Nov. 10, 2013 4:19 p.m. ET
A job after graduation. It's what all parents want for their kids. So, what's the smartest way to invest tuition dollars to make that happen? The question is more complicated, and more pressing, than ever. The economy is still shaky, and many graduating students are unable to find jobs that pay well, if they can find jobs at all. The result is that parents guiding their children through the college-application process—and college itself—have to be something like venture capitalists. They have to think through the potential returns from different paths, and pick the one that has the best chance of paying off. For many parents and students, the most-lucrative path seems obvious: be practical. The public and private sectors are urging kids to abandon the liberal arts, and study fields where the job market is hot right now. Schools, in turn, are responding with new, specialized courses that promise to teach skills that students will need on the job. A degree in hospital financing? Casino management? Pharmaceutical marketing? Little wonder that business majors outnumber liberal-arts majors in the U.S. by two-to-one, and the trend is for even more focused programs targeted to niches in the labor market.
It all makes sense. Except for one thing: It probably won't work. The trouble is that nobody can predict where the jobs will be—not the employers, not the schools, not the government officials who are making such loud calls for vocational training. The economy is simply too fickle to guess way ahead of time, and any number of other changes could roil things as well. Choosing the wrong path could make things worse, not better.
So, how should the venture-capitalist parents proceed? What should they weigh as they decide where to put their limited capital to get the biggest bang? Here are some things to consider.
Does the Product Get Out the Door?
You can pick the perfect school in terms of courses and location and price and ambience. But none of it does a student any good if he or she doesn't end up with a degree. After all, college improves job prospects only if a student graduates. That is why it is crucial to scrutinize the graduation rates at various schools.
What's more, it is also important to look at how long it takes students to graduate. Only about 60% of Division 1 university students graduate in six years, for example.
Many parents and students don't realize that even top schools differ greatly in their ability to get students out the door to graduation on time. Consider the difference between an elite private university like Stanford University and an elite public university like the University of California, Berkeley. My colleague Robert Zemsky found that the private school has a much wider array of support services—counseling, tutoring and so forth—that vastly improve the odds that a student will actually graduate, and will do so in four years. An expensive, private school may end up being cheaper if a student doesn't have to be there as long.
Probably the most important statistics to scrutinize are job-placement rates for graduates, but they are often hard to get and easy to fudge. Are we measuring jobs at graduation, or within a year after? Do internships count as a "job"?
Statistics about starting salaries, to judge the quality of those jobs, can be even more elusive. In the absence of good data, visit the school's career center and see which employers are actually interviewing students and for what jobs.
Parents and students should push to require schools to post graduation rates, job-placement rates and other information on the outcomes for their graduates—especially considering how many students are now using government-backed loans to pay for their education. It is not in the public interest for students to use public funds for vocational degrees that don't have a good chance of paying off.
Today's Jobs Aren't Necessarily Tomorrow's
The trend toward specialized, vocational degrees is understandable, with an increasing number of companies grumbling that graduates aren't coming out of school qualified to work.
But guessing about what will be hot tomorrow based on what's hot today is often a fool's errand.
The problem is that the job market can change rapidly for unforeseeable reasons. Today, we frequently hear that computers and information technology are and will be the hot fields, but both have gone from boom to bust over time. Students poured into IT programs in the late 1990s, responding to the Silicon Valley boom, only to graduate after 2001 into the tech bust.
Changes in regulations, meanwhile, can rapidly create and kill fields. For instance, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act amped up the demand for accountants. Emerging technologies can be just as disruptive—applicant-tracking software eliminates jobs in recruiting, while cellphones create programming jobs in mobile technology. Developments like these are almost impossible to anticipate.
It gets even more complicated than that. Let's say governments and colleges could tell what the demand would be for a particular occupation years out. The problem for someone making an investment in that occupation is that everyone else has the same information. That means students will rush to train in that field, the supply of potential workers goes up, and the jobs are no longer so attractive.
Consider an email that Texas A&M University sent to this year's class of incoming petroleum engineers, the hottest job in the U.S. in terms of starting wages.
The message reminded students that the job market for engineers has always been competitive and cyclical, and warned, "Recent data suggests that some concern about the sustainability of the entry-level job market during a time of explosive growth in the number of students studying petroleum engineering in U.S. universities may be prudent."
Unfortunately, that kind of caution isn't common. Schools want to get as many applicants as possible, and to get the best ones to attend. Showing parents and students all the caveats that go with the impressions they create about future jobs may conflict with those interests.
The Danger of Specialization
Another important caveat that doesn't get discussed much: It may be worse to have thewrong career focus in college than having no career focus—because skills for one career often can't be used elsewhere.
Let's say a student spends four years learning to market pharmaceuticals. But what can he or she do with that degree if the drug companies aren't hiring? The skills don't transfer easily anyplace else.
That may even be true within a field. Anthony Carnevale, of Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce, calculates that the unemployment rate among recent IT graduates at the moment is actually twice that of theater majors. Despite the constant complaints from IT employers about skill shortages, only certain skills within IT are hot at the moment, such as those associated with mobile communications.
Focusing on a very specific field also means that you miss out on courses that might broaden your abilities. Courses that teach, say, hospitality management or sports medicine may crowd out a logic class that can help students learn to improve their reasoning or an English class that sharpens their writing. Both of those skills can help in any field, unlike the narrowly focused ones.
Beyond those concerns, a narrow educational focus forces students to pick a career at age 17, before they know much of anything about their interests and abilities. And if they choose incorrectly, it can be very difficult for them to start over once they're older.
Researchers Eric A. Hanushek, Ludger Woessmann and Lei Zhang find that more vocationally focused education in high school appears to limit adaptability to changing labor markets later in life. The same thing may be true in college.
All that said, practical degrees do have value. But they're not nearly as valuable as boosters say.
Yes, in some fields, like engineering, the only way in is with a specialized degree. Other things being equal, students with one of these degrees will have an easier time getting their first job in the field than students with liberal-arts degrees. After the first job, though, it is not clear how much advantage that practical degree has.
Certainly, some matter in part because they are prestigious—such as a Wharton M.B.A.—but for those that aren't prestigious, and where the degree isn't required or common, a degree may not matter at all.
Also consider that what companies really want hires to have is actual work experience. If they have a choice between hiring someone fresh out of a hospitality-degree program or someone who doesn't have that degree but who has run a restaurant, they will choose the latter.
The Way Forward
So, what are the practical lessons for the venture-investor parent and their child?
Students that go the practical route should delay choosing majors and specialized courses as long as possible, so that there is likely to be a better match between course work and employer interests. Students can rely on real-time information from the career office to gauge demand. Because of the need to adjust, it also helps to be at a school where switching majors is easy. Small programs with limited resources mean that students may have to stay more than four years to get all the courses that are required for a new major.
Naturally, it is good to know the job-placement rates for graduates. But as we've seen, those numbers may not be available. So, beyond visiting the school's career center, they should see what ties the school has to employers and what its reputation is in their child's prospective industry.
If specialized education seems too limited or risky, there is another path to consider, one that often gets short shrift these days: go to college to get a well-rounded education and worry about the job market after graduation.
It may seem impractical, given the state of the economy and the scramble for jobs that many liberal-arts graduates face. But remember that work experience is what really is important to employers—and graduates without vocational training can now get that experience from a number of programs.
Bootcamp Education's DevBootcamp provides an experience that mimics a real job. Participants learn by working on real projects, and the company helps them build leads to employers. General Assembly offers hands-on learning and partners with companies to develop curriculum and create hiring relationships for graduates.
Education providers like Dartmouth's Tuck Business School are also getting into the act. Tuck has a nondegree certificate Business Bridge program aimed at juniors, seniors and recent graduates in a nonbusiness degree of study. The program offers a general management curriculum as well as career development to enter the job market.
More people than parents should pay attention to this shift toward vocational college degrees. A lot of taxpayer money supports these programs, and in states like Texas, the pressure is on to steer even more students toward them. It is an expensive and inefficient way to provide the practical skills that employers want for the first job out of school, though, as well as being a big, risky bet for parents to underwrite.
There should be better alternatives. One might be for employers to rethink whether they could go back to providing some of the initial training and work experience college grads used to get in entry-level jobs a generation ago.
Dr. Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School and Professor of Education. He can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Finding investors: What you need to prepare
Ask FSB's tips for preparing your pitch to venture capitalists.
Ask FSB
Get small-business intelligence from the experts. Here's a chance for YOU to ask your pressing small-business questions, and FSB editors will help you get answers from the appropriate experts.
(FORTUNE Small Business) -- Dear FSB: Where can a successful company that has grown through reinvesting profits look to get investors to help take the company to the next level?
- Michael Solovy, Eden Prarie, Minn.
Dear Michael: This is a problem that many startups face. If your venture is too risky for a bank loan (see "How can I qualify for a loan?"), your next step is to decide if you should approach angel investors, who typically give less than $500,000, or venture capitalists, who usually invest $1 million or more in high-growth companies and in return take an equity stake in the company.
Regardless of which you chose, the same rules for approaching them apply.
Lawrence Gelburd, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, tells his students to divide the prep work into two categories: assembling the analytical data they'll need to present to potential investors, and networking to reach the right people.
"No business plan has ever been funded," he says. "People get funded. When people are deciding whether to give you money, they will look you in the eye and decide whether or not you are trustworthy and will do what you claim with the money."
On the data side, Gelburd recommends practicing answering the following questions so that you have no hesitation when speaking with an investor:
1. Who is the customer?
Once you've got your answers down, work on your charm and investor lingo. Attend pitch lunches to see other peoples' presentations. Network at VC fairs in your area - you can find them by contacting your local Small Business Administration office.
Note that cold calling is useless - and no one knows this better than Kay Koplovitz of Koplovitz and Co., an investment firm in New York City.
"Move through your own contacts - lawyers, attorneys and bankers - to make an introduction," she suggests. "Also, find out if the Angel Capital Association or the National Venture Capitalist Association is holding events in your area. Finally, look to your local university or business incubator for assistance."
Once you get the attention of an investor, keep you pitch brief.
"A two-page executive summary is all you need," Koplovitz says. "Be sure to describe the company's service, market size, your background, the amount you are requesting and what you plan to do with the funds."
Gelburd also recommends offering references, even if they're not requested.
If you are hoping to score a small amount of capital and decide to network with angels, don't underestimate the power of early planning. One day you may need to reach a VC, so be sure to establish relationships with them before you actually need them.
For more information, Koplovitz suggests checking out business school websites and the website of Springboard Enterprises for examples of executive summaries and other resources, and the Kauffman Foundation for information on networking with investors in your area.
Lessons from the fastest: How the FSB 100 fastest-growing small companies made the list
Have you scored VC or angel investment? Tell our readers how you did it.

subset: commoncrawl


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Saddam Hussein, 2003 News
despotic president of Iraq, was captured in December by U.S. troops on an isolated farm near Tikrit, his hometown. He was hiding in an 8-foot hole. He surrendered to soldiers without a fight. Hussein brought war upon his country in March with his arrogant refusal to cooperate with the international community and disarm. He also stirred bitter discord in the UN, a role he clearly relished. After the war, troops discovered several mass graves and torture chambers, evidence of rampant human rights abuses at the hands of Hussein.
Here are the facts and trivia that people are buzzing about.


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Good morning, everybody! Today on DSH, we are thrilled to be hosting this month's History Carnival, a moving showcase of some of the best new history posts from the previous month. We have a lot of great stuff for you from the ancient world to modern Britain, so grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and travel around the world with us in fifteen fascinating history posts.
On History in the Margins, Pamela Toler has a timely post about defensive walls in history, in particular, The Great Wall of China. While The Great Wall we know today was mostly constructed by the Ming dynasty in the Middle Ages, the walls' first defenses were actually erected some fifteen hundred years earlier to keep out "barbarians" from the steppes.
On Military History and Warfare, Alexander Clark has an excellent review of Peter Frankopan's The First Crusade: The Call from the East. While there are many history books about the Crusades, Frankopan adds to the discussion by considering the Byzantine perspective through analysis of Anna Komnene's The Alexiad, a history of Alexios' reign through the eyes of his daughter. The review is an informative history post in itself, and I will be adding both Frankopan's book and Military History and Warfare to my reading list.
Theresa Phipps has a fantastic post on law as it was applied to violent women in medieval England on The Dangerous Women Project. While it is still surprisingly difficult to find solid resources on the legal status of women in the Middle Ages, Phipps uses primary legal documents and court records to examine specific cases of women misbehaving and explains why women were viewed as particularly dangerous. "Law, Violence, and 'Dangerous Women.'"
In "The Otherness of Now: Contemporary History via Berger & Sontag," George Campbell Gosling continues the discussion of storytelling and the particular challenges of writing modern and contemporary history started by John Berger and Susan Sontag on Channel 4 in 1983. Where do we as historians start, if we don't know how the story ends? How do we analyze events that are still taking place? https://gcgosling.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/berger-sontag/
Ever wonder where the SS went for their vacations? No, me either. However, the story of the Wannsee villa is not just a bizarre look at a former Nazi holiday resort. The history of the villa is also intertwined with the fortunes of the Nazi party, from failed Putsch, to Final Solution, to Holocaust museum and archive. Sometimes walls can talk… The Wannsee Conference on Art and Architecture, Mainly
Paris & Prague
Brand new art blog Vermillion Goldfish made a splash (sorry) this month with its first post, an in-depth look at In Quest of Beauty, the latest exhibition of Alphonse Mucha's work that explores the theory of beauty that inspired the artist's iconic portraits that still grace stationary and paper the walls of dorm rooms the world over. So much more than a teaser, this post offers valuable insight into Mucha's work and explains his personal perception of beauty. We may associate his models with theatrical costumes and gravity-defying hair, but for Mucha, beauty was all about idealized femininity and serenity of expression.
J.K. Knauss stopped by Unusual Historicals with the story of Maria de Padilla, the mistress of King Pedro of Castile. While Pedro was obliged to marry for political advantage, Maria was the love of his life. Often overlooked by historians due to her (ahem) position as mistress, Maria gave Pedro four children during his two failed marriages and spent her time founding convents and monasteries before she died of plague at the ripe old age of twenty-seven.
Catherine Kullman looks at the extraordinary notebook of British naval Commander Charles Haultain R.N. on My Scrap Album. Over a twelve year period, Haultain filled the book with newspaper clippings, pop up pictures, poetry, and personal stories of his adventures in the Mediterranean from ages twenty-four to thirty-six, such as the time he thought he found the grave of Hannibal in Malta…
Zenobia Neil guests on Writing the Past with "Love is a Monster," a delightful post about love in the ancient world. Love in Rome was anything but romantic, where marriages were made and ended for the sake of political alliance and love was a debilitating madness. She uses the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius' The Golden Ass to argue that the dual love/fury aspects of Venus were effectively the same thing to a society that did not view love as a benevolent force, but rightly feared its potentially devastating power.
Sardinia…and Cherokee Country
On History Imagined, Caroline Warfield traces the Jacobite succession following Bonnie Prince Charlie to the House of Savoy in Sardinia. On the same blog, Linda Bennett Pennell writes about the daily lives of the Cherokee during the colonization of the United States in "When Being Civilized Was Not Enough." History Imagined has years' worth of fascinating social history archives and it's well worth having a browse.
New York
If you're out and about in upstate New York, you might consider stopping by Johnson Hall State Historic Site in Johnstown. Chris Clemens has an interesting post on Exploring Upstate about Sir William Johnson's life from his position as British Superintendent of Indian Affairs and his relations with the Mohawk tribe (he learned their language and married a Mohawk woman) to his being awarded a baronetcy and constructing Johnson Hall. Lots of great photos of a lovingly preserved Colonial mansion.
Michelle Cox is writing the history of Chicago, one person at a time. Her latest post, "I Wanted to Be With People," tells the life story of Erna (Hager) Lindner, an Austrian woman who immigrated to Chicago in 1925 at the age of nineteen. Erna moved to America on her own in pursuit of a boy from her church she had fallen in love with; three months after arriving in Chicago, she found him and married him. Michelle Cox's blog is packed with compelling stories of the everyday people that make up Chicago's colorful past and is a goldmine for anyone interested in early twentieth century social history, and may also be useful for those tracing their family history through Chicago.
Just for Fun
Anna Castle takes a look at the postures of monarchs throughout history from an ergonomic perspective in "How to Sit on a Throne." See right, Elizabeth Russell looks a bit too comfortable with that footstool she has found…


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The Bias Question
In a surprising challenge to the SAT's reputation as an unbiased measure of student learning, one researcher has argued that blacks do better than matched-ability whites on the harder questions of the SAT—something he believes their scores should reflect
When the telephone rang in the kitchen of his townhouse in Lambertville, New Jersey, one morning last April, Roy O. Freedle had just taken his blood-pressure medicine. That was good, he thought later, because it turned out to be a stressful conversation. The caller was Drew Gitomer, the senior vice-president for research and development at the Educational Testing Service, where Freedle had worked for more than thirty years as a research psychologist, before retiring in 1998. The two men were of different generations—Gitomer was forty-six and Freedle was sixty-nine. They had not known each other well when Freedle was still at ETS, but the older man had a good idea why the younger man was calling.
Just a few days before, a long article by Freedle had appeared in the Harvard Educational Review arguing that the most important test in America, the SAT, was racially biased. Previous work on bias in the SAT, he wrote, had failed to point out that African-Americans were doing better on harder questions of the test than non-Hispanic whites with the same SAT scores. Minority students, along with culturally deprived whites with similarly hidden abilities, he argued, should have an assessment of their previously undiscovered talents shown to colleges so that they could get fairer decisions from admissions committees. Because ETS and its New York-based client the College Board had given birth to the SAT, still depended on it for much of their income, and spent considerable time and energy trying to keep biased questions out of the exam, Gitomer was none too pleased by Freedle's argument.
The SAT I, called the Reasoning Test by the College Board, is a three-hour, mostly multiple-choice test of verbal and mathematical knowledge and skills. In its three quarters of a century as a college-entrance examination it has become a giant; more than 2.2 million students took the test in the 2001-2002 school year, some more than once. Nearly as many people last year took the ACT, the SAT's Iowa-based rival, but the SAT gets more attention because it is the prevalent college-admissions test in the major government, financial, and media centers of the East and West Coasts. A revised version of the SAT, to be introduced in March of 2005, will add grammar questions and a written essay, replace quantitative comparisons with second-year algebra questions, and replace analogies with more reading questions.
Plenty of Americans, particularly those familiar with the subtlest forms of ethnic prejudice, think there is something wrong with the SAT, and with other standardized tests. For the high school class of 2002 the average score for a non-Hispanic white student on the 1600-point test was 1060. The average score for a black student was 857, or 203 points lower. (For Asians the average was 1070, and for Hispanics it was slightly over 900.) The gap between blacks and whites on the test is sixteen points greater today than it was in 1992.
If minority students are at a disadvantage in taking the SAT, their choice of colleges will be significantly limited, with important implications for their financial, professional, and social futures. In other words, the SAT is interfering with the pursuit of happiness—a problem that has long absorbed the efforts of education researchers and civil-rights lawyers, with not nearly as much progress as anyone would like.
Freedle's accusation of racial bias in the SAT is striking because it is one of the few ever to come from an experienced ETS professional. Perhaps more important, it has caught the attention of the University of California (a powerful malcontent in the College Board family), which has ordered its own detailed analysis of the issue, due to be completed in 2004. Even if Freedle is ultimately proved wrong, his success at raising doubts about the SAT shows how loose a grip the test has on the political and scientific handholds that keep it upright.
In his book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), Nicholas Lemann described how the existence of the racial test-score gap and the difficulty of closing it began to dawn on American policymakers in the mid twentieth century, just as the SAT was becoming the arbiter of which young people would get ahead, at least academically, and which would not. One of the first warnings had to do with socioeconomic bias rather than specifically racial bias. Lemann found an item in the diary of Henry Chauncey, the first president of ETS, showing that he had read an article in the April 1948 issue of The Scientific Monthly arguing that tests like the SAT could be biased against low-income students. But Chauncey dismissed it as a "radical point of view." The first prominent case involving the issue of racial bias in testing arose later, and dealt not with college-entrance tests but with employment exams. In 1963 the Illinois Fair Employment Practices Commission ordered a Motorola television factory in Chicago to hire a young African-American who had been denied a job because of his score on an IQ test. ETS and others had been promoting tests in hiring decisions, Lemann wrote, but it never occurred to them that the results would be used to systematically exclude members of minorities. The Motorola case had a profound effect, especially on the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Senator John Tower, of Texas, inserted an amendment into the act specifically permitting the use of ability tests in employment. "Thus did standardized testing become a part of a landmark law in American history," Lemann wrote.
At about the same time, civil-rights activists, legislators, judges, and educators began using the term "affirmative action" to justify offering opportunities to minority members who otherwise would not have seemed qualified. In the 1960s and 1970s colleges and universities that had more applicants than spaces began to give preference to some minority students who had lower test scores than whites but whose high school grades and personal qualities suggested that they would benefit from a demanding academic environment.
This form of affirmative action was buttressed by the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. The Court ruled 5-4 against the quota system used by the university's medical school, whereby sixteen places out of a hundred in each entering class were reserved for minority students. However, Justice Lewis F. Powell wrote in his opinion that race could be considered in admissions decisions.
Shortly thereafter the College Board set up a fairness-review process that subjected every potential SAT question to close examination for racial stereotypes, loaded words, inappropriate assumptions, or anything else that might put minority students at a disadvantage. Questions dealing with subjects beyond the experience of a typical inner-city student, such as yachting or debutante balls, were thrown out. The College Board, together with ETS, also produced studies showing that the SAT was doing its job and did not make minority academic skills look any worse than they were. The data demonstrated that the SAT predicted about as well as high school grades how a student would do in his or her first year of college. And since selective schools did not want to admit applicants who could not meet their standards, and since they had to have some defensible way to sort applicants whose relative academic merits were sometimes hard to quantify, the SAT—and the ACT—not only survived the occasional assaults on their methodology but continued to grow.
Inside ETS, in 1990, the senior scholar Winton Manning thought he had found a way of partly addressing the SAT's racial gap with his invention of the MAT, the Measure of Academic Talent. It was designed, in part, to give minority students a boost by identifying those whose SAT scores were higher than would be expected from their families' incomes and educational backgrounds. The idea died because of technical deficiencies and what Lemann described as fear among ETS executives about the commercial consequences of the corollary effect: adjusting downward the scores of affluent students who had not done as well as their backgrounds predicted. A group within ETS later proposed a version of the MAT called "Strivers," but this also received little support. In recent years the College Board has supported research, by the Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg and others, into alternative tests, of creative and practical skills. Sternberg said that his initial results produced smaller ethnic test-score gaps than the SAT, but he acknowledged that his test still needed years of work.
In the late 1990s SAT critics hailed the experiments of the Stanford psychologist Claude M. Steele, who had found a factor he called "stereotype threat" that seemed to explain lower scores by even successful black students. (See "Thin Ice: 'Stereotype Threat' and Black College Students," in the August 1999 Atlantic.) Steele tested black Stanford undergraduates, in some cases telling them that the results would be used to assess their verbal ability, and in other cases stressing that ability was not what was being tested. Scores were significantly lower when test takers thought their verbal ability—and therefore their intellectual ability—was being assessed. Steele argued that the students were reacting to the pressure of feeling they had to disprove negative stereotypes of African-Americans' intellectual ability, and that this at least partly explained the achievement gap.
The continuing debate over the worthiness of the SAT did have an effect on higher-education admissions policies. Some colleges, such as Muhlenberg, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Bowdoin, in Brunswick, Maine, began to market themselves as places where students did not need the SAT to apply. In the 1990s the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, began to compile a list—now nearing the 400 mark—of schools that do not require either the SAT or the ACT, or require them only from applicants who do not meet other criteria. Most selective colleges, however, remained committed to the tests.
Standardized testing was recently scrutinized in a suit against the University of Michigan, whose undergraduate admissions process used a point system that awarded significant points for being a member of a minority group. In 1997 two applicants sought to overturn Michigan's system after being rejected despite having higher ACT scores than some minority students who were accepted. FairTest and other groups argued in amicus curiae briefs that any decision relying heavily on the ACT or the SAT as a valid admissions factor would be wrong. Indeed, according to the FairTest brief, which focused on the SAT, the test was not even a good predictor of first-year college grades; high school records, FairTest said, were a significantly more accurate gauge of college performance. (The College Board and ETS have maintained that either SAT scores or grades are better predictors than any alternatives, and recommended that colleges continue using them in combination.) Last summer the Supreme Court ruled that although diversity was a legitimate goal, the point system was not an acceptable means of achieving it. Under this ruling schools may still use affirmative action, as long as the admissions process evaluates each applicant individually and not by a point formula. In practical terms this means that the college-admissions process, at least as it relates to affirmative action, can go on much as it has for the past forty years or so: selective colleges will continue to accept minority students with test scores below those of some rejected white applicants in order to maintain campus diversity, but most will also continue to use the SAT and the ACT, despite their imperfections, to help in evaluating applicants.
Freedle's attack on the SAT came at a time when ETS and the College Board thought the scholarly debate over the fairness of the test had been settled. The gap between blacks' and whites' performance on the SAT was clear. The blame, they thought, should be placed not on the test but on differences in family income and culture—and on K-12 school policies infected by lingering racism. Many middle-class black and Hispanic families were new to affluence and higher education, and on average, some researchers argued, were not quite as middle-class as their white neighbors. That meant that their children were still at a disadvantage in an academic setting, and only more time and better schooling would close the gap. Furthermore, high schools appeared to be putting minority students in less challenging classes out of a misplaced concern, fed by old stereotypes, that the students would not be able to handle the demands of honors and Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses.
"It is not bias in the tests," Wayne Camara, the vice-president of research and development for the College Board, said in an interview with me this spring. "It is the differences in the opportunities the students have to get a quality education, the kinds of support they have in school and in the community and in the home." The College Board's president, Gaston Caperton, agrees. "If this is a bad test, I wouldn't have taken this job. Wayne wouldn't have come to work here. No college president would have used these tests, which they have for years and years, if it were a bad test. None of us would be part of it."
Freedle more or less accepted the view that the SAT was a useful measuring tool, but he believed the test had a flaw that could be corrected. He first became interested in the SAT for the same reason many people do. He saw himself as one of those whose lives were changed by higher education. His father was a tool-and-die maker. His mother was a waitress. He grew up in the Chicago area and majored in psychology and biology at Roosevelt University while working in the mailrooms of Marshall Field's and the Universal Atlas Cement Company. At Columbia, where he earned his doctorate in experimental psychology in 1964, he supported himself with typing jobs and work in the architecture-department office. He was the first person in his family to go to college, much less graduate school.
At Columbia he became interested in how the structure of language in passages heard or read influenced thought and perception. He worked briefly at a Washington research firm after getting his doctorate. Then, in 1967, the eminent cognitive psychologist John B. Carroll lured him to ETS. Freedle enjoyed years of pure research on short-term memory, but when grants for such work became hard to get, he was happy to try his hand at more-practical projects.
He began to analyze questions on the Test of English as a Foreign Language, an exam for students from abroad who want to qualify for places at American universities. He found that by analyzing various linguistic aspects of the questions—word order, word placement, interrogative style—he could predict which ones test takers in Seoul or Shanghai or Sarajevo would find easy and which would make them chew their pencils and look at the clock.
Freedle identified seven factors that seemed to affect the difficulty of a test question. One of the most common was simple word repetition. If an answer had a word in it that also appeared in the question, more test takers chose it; thus a question was easier if it contained a word that recurred in the correct answer, and harder if it contained a word that recurred in an incorrect answer. In reading-comprehension questions another factor was where in a reading passage the key part appeared. If it was at the beginning or the end of the passage, the question was easier than if it was in the middle.
Then he decided he would apply his analysis to ETS's biggest test. He realized that if he looked at how different ethnic groups reacted to the seven factors, he might help to improve the SAT and impress his supervisors, who indicated that rooting out bias in the test was a priority.
Freedle was excited by a new technique called differential item functioning, or DIF (pronounced diff). To see which questions on the verbal section of the SAT produced different results by race, test takers were first divided into groups by score: those who had scored 200, the lowest possible; those who had scored 210; those who had scored 220; and on up to 800, the top score. Each of those scoring groups were examined to see how people of different ethnicities had done on each item of the test.
Using DIF, Freedle began to notice some intriguing results, which turned out to have more to do with word choice than with the seven difficulty factors. At each level of ability, but particularly in the lower-scoring groups, white students on average did better than blacks on the easier items, whereas blacks on average did better than whites on the harder ones. (Whites, though, did better overall.)
That was not a result that Freedle's supervisors expected. In 1987 he handed in a draft of a report on the subject that he had done with Irene Kostin, an ETS colleague. The research-division chiefs asked for a revision. He handed in a second draft. They were still not satisfied. Some of the questions were legitimate, Freedle thought. His conclusions contradicted other research. The chiefs wanted him to look at the data from other angles. But each re-examination confirmed the initial results. By the time he was ordered to do an eleventh revision, Freedle had begun to wonder if ETS, in its scholarly way, was trying to discourage him from pursuing his rogue conclusion.
The report was eventually accepted, but his requests to do follow-up research were politely rejected. (A similar topic was assigned to other researchers, who did not get far with it.) He could have made a ruckus. Other ETS researchers had when they thought their best efforts were being buried. But Freedle just wanted to keep working, so he concentrated on his techniques for predicting the difficulty of items, which he knew interested the company. Over the next few years he wrote several reports on the subject. But by the late 1990s all his research proposals were being turned down. Others at ETS were also having a hard time getting projects approved, he says, but he thinks his supervisors had a particular problem with his work.
So in October of 1998 Freedle retired, taking with him much of his old data. He wanted to pursue on his own something that had popped out of his ETS work. On average, black students were performing only slightly above matched-ability whites on the hard questions—but averages did not submit applications to colleges; individual students did. When he broke the data down to specific cases, he found that many minority students got a boost of a hundred points or more on the SAT if the score was weighted toward the hard items.
Working from his townhouse, Freedle could no longer dip whenever he wanted to into the deep well of College Board SAT results. The provocative paper he had in mind could not be published in any peer-reviewed journal, because he did not have the statistical backup. But still he thought the idea was sound. He sent a thick sheaf of pages to the Harvard Educational Review. The editors whittled it down in time for the spring 2003 issue and titled it "Correcting the SAT's Ethnic and Social-Class Bias: A Method for Reestimating SAT Scores." (Freedle's analysis focused on comparing the test results of non-Hispanic whites with those of African-Americans, though he argued that it could be more widely applied, to the disadvantaged of all ethnic groups.)
In the article Freedle proposed a supplement to SAT scores, called the Revised-SAT, or R-SAT, which would be calculated based only on the hard items. By putting more emphasis on the results for the harder test questions, Freedle argued, the supplement would "greatly increase the number of high-scoring minority individuals." His late-1980s research with Kostin had revealed, using the DIF method, "evidence of an unintended but persistent cultural and statistical bias in the verbal section of the SAT that adversely affects African Americans," he wrote.
It should be noted from the outset that virtually all these DIF item effects are typically small. For example, White students may get 84 percent correct on some easy items, while African Americans get a slightly lower number, say 82 percent, correct for the same item. Conversely, for some particular hard items, White students may get 30 percent correct whereas African Americans might get a slightly higher score, say 31 percent correct. What is unusual about these effects is their highly patterned nature; that is, many easy items show a small but persistent effect of African Americans' underperformance, while many hard items show their overperformance ...
A culturally based interpretation helps explain why African American examinees (and other minorities) often do better on many hard verbal items but do worse than matched-ability Whites on many easy items. To begin with, easy analogy items tend to contain high-frequency vocabulary words while hard analogy items tend to contain low-frequency vocabulary words ... For example, words such as "horse," "snake," "canoe," and "golf" have appeared in several easy analogy items. These are words used frequently in everyday conversations. By contrast, words such as "vehemence," "anathema," "sycophant," and "intractable" are words that have appeared in hard analogy items, and do not appear in everyday conversation ... However, they are likely to occur in school-related contexts or in textbooks.
Common words, Freedle explained, "often have many more semantic (dictionary) senses than rare words," so there's more of a chance that people's cultural and socio-economic backgrounds will affect their interpretations of those words. (In a 1990 study Freedle and Kostin reported that "fifteen high-frequency analogy words ... had an average of 5.2 dictionary entries, whereas rare analogy words ... had an average of only 2.0 dictionary entries.") Thus words that are frequently used in the middle-class neighborhoods of the SAT makers may have a different meaning in underprivileged minority neighborhoods. This, Freedle continued, could help explain why African-American students do worse on questions containing those common words than on questions that depend on the harder (but less ambiguous) words they study at school. He found that this effect was most pronounced on those questions—sentence completions, analogies—that provided little or no context.
Although Freedle's analysis concentrated on the verbal section of the SAT, he argued that the difficulty-bias effect extended to the math section, and perhaps even to essay questions such as those found on AP exams. He cited research showing minority students doing better than non-Hispanic whites on harder math items, which he attributed to the fact that those items used more textbooklike language and "more abstract concepts learned strictly in the classroom." Minority students scored worse on the easier math items, just as they did on easier verbal items, because commoner words were used in those questions. Freedle said that an examination of essay test results showed a somewhat similar effect, whereby minority students scored better on harder topics than they did on easier ones.
He believed that a supplemental SAT score was the best solution. He emphasized that he was not out to destroy the most important product of ETS and the College Board. He was not proposing a completely new SAT. He liked the adjustments the College Board was making to the test, including the thirty-minute essay section that would be added in 2005. He wanted his R-SAT scores to be sent to colleges as a bonus, to help them identify students, mostly lower-income students of all races, whose SAT scores suffered because of the distance between the language of their families and neighborhoods and that of middle-class America.
He did not try to estimate how many students would benefit from this additional information, but he thought it would be enough to make the supplement worthwhile. Freedle found one African-American student (Freedle's data gave no names) whose verbal R-SAT score was 600 although his or her original verbal SAT score was only 290. "This student's gain score is 310 points—an astonishingly large reassessment of his/her scholastic skills," Freedle wrote. Potentially thousands of students would score 100 to 200 points higher on the R-SAT than on the SAT; that higher score could mean the difference between getting into a selective college and not. Such increases in their scores might also make them eligible for thousands of dollars in scholarships.
Freedle confessed that he did not have enough data to analyze the current form of the SAT, which differs in some ways from the SAT he had analyzed while still working at ETS. But he saw no reason why an R-SAT score wouldn't still benefit some minority students. Nor did he think that the SAT changes to take effect in 2005, including the removal of the analogies, would be enough to eliminate the need for an R-SAT, since the gap between easy words and hard words—or the gap between what people learn at home and what they learn at school—affected other parts of the test. He hoped that ETS would give his analysis the follow-up it deserved: a rigorous testing of its validity and predictive value. "The expense is truly minimal, the moral obligation maximal," he concluded.
When Drew Gitomer read the Review article, he felt not only that Freedle's conclusion was wrong but that his analysis was nonsense. It was based on snippets of old data and seemed to put great weight on correct answers that could be explained as random guesses. He asked some of his staff members to look at it, and then thought about what he should do. He helped the College Board to post a quick Web-site response, which criticized Freedle's paper as "flawed" and "misleading," and organized his staff to produce something longer and more complete, but still he worried about Freedle's use of SAT data, which he thought might be College Board property.
Gitomer, like Freedle, was a cognitive psychologist committed to the values of science. He had arrived at ETS in 1985 with a keen interest in finding better ways of training people for complex tasks and in creating alternatives to fill-in-the-box assessment tools like the SAT. Five years later, not yet thirty-five, he won the company's annual Scientist Award. But in 1999 Gitomer agreed to be the top administrator of the research division. So when Freedle's article appeared, the job of damage control fell to him. The ETS executive had promised himself that he would not get angry on the phone. He would not discuss the many large holes he saw in the article. He just wanted to be able to answer the questions he anticipated from the College Board: Had Freedle used some of its data that he was not authorized to have? Were more such articles on the way?
The pleasantries did not take long. Gitomer got to the point. "I have read your paper in the Harvard Educational Review," he said. "Where did you get the data?"
"That's the wrong question," Freedle replied. He wanted Gitomer to see the benefits of taking his work seriously. "You should view this, and the College Board should view this, as a positive development, and I really mean it. I have solved a significant problem for you."
Gitomer could see that he was not going to get an answer, but he tried again. "Well, let me ask you, then," he said. "How else did you get the data?"
"Again, that is the wrong question," Freedle said. "I think you must use this as a positive thing." He was not going to talk about people who might have shared information with him, and Gitomer was not interested in pushing him further. He asked if Freedle had any more articles in the works. Freedle said no. Relieved, Gitomer said good-bye and hung up.
Gitomer wrote a note to himself on the top of the first page of Freedle's article: "Call Atkinson." This was a reference to Richard C. Atkinson, the president of the University of California system. Atkinson had become the fulcrum of the SAT debate. Like Freedle and Gitomer, he was a cognitive psychologist who understood how the SAT was constructed. Parts of the test he did not like. It had too many psychometric tricks (in his view, the analogies were the worst) that forced college applicants to take expensive SAT-prep courses in order to decipher what Atkinson thought were irrelevancies—for example, is "entomology to insects" more like "agriculture to cows" or "pedagogy to education"? So, wielding his power, the U.C. president had persuaded the College Board to junk the analogies, add more-advanced math, and create the writing section for the 2005 version. He did this as a way of making the test fairer for all students. And Gitomer knew that he was likely to be intrigued by any suggestion that certain questions put minority students at a disadvantage.
Freedle realized the same thing, and decided to call Atkinson himself. His call was returned by Patrick S. Hayashi, the associate president of the U.C. system. After a friendly chat Hayashi suggested that Freedle talk with Saul Geiser, the director of research in Atkinson's office. Geiser told Freedle that U.C. planned to do just the kind of serious analysis of the latest data that Freedle had hoped ETS and the College Board would do.
As it happened, Gitomer did not call Atkinson, but a few days later he spoke to Mark Wilson, a Berkeley psychometrician who had been asked by U.C. to analyze Freedle's report. Gitomer told Wilson that he welcomed the U.C. study, because Freedle had raised serious issues—"no matter how scientifically bankrupt I believe they are." Wayne Camara, of the College Board, said that he, too, was happy to cooperate. However, the College Board's Web-site response to Freedle's article seemed to imply that any study of Freedle's results would be largely a waste of time.
Let us look briefly at the data for the so-called SAT-R Section that Freedle recommends. On the difficult items that are included in the SAT-R, African-American candidates receive an average score of 22 percent out of a perfect score of 100 percent. Since there are five answer options for each question, 22 percent is only slightly above what would be expected from random guessing, namely 20 percent. White candidates do somewhat better, achieving an average score of 31 percent. The results indicate that this test is too hard for either group and would be a frustrating experience for most students. There are simply too many questions that are geared to those with a much higher level of knowledge and skill than is required of college freshmen. Extending Freedle's argument, we could substantially reduce all group differences if the test were made significantly more difficult so that all examinees would have to guess the answers to nearly all of the questions. We could then predict that each subgroup would have to have an average of 20 percent of their answers correct, based on chance.
Freedle's response to this, in a draft memo that he never sent to the College Board, was "Shame on you." He said he had done a statistical analysis of the five choices in the questions studied and found that the students' picks did not seem to be random at all; taking his study further would not be adding error to error. Some independent experts dismissed the Freedle piece. "I was unimpressed," says Robert Linn, a University of Colorado professor and a former president of the American Educational Research Association. "I don't think there is much there." But some found it valuable. Robert Calfee, a retired Stanford cognitive psychologist who now serves as the dean of the education school at U.C. Riverside, said he found Freedle's article "very convincing and to me very understandable." His analysis of the effect of different language cultures on test results, Calfee said, seemed to mirror other research on the powerful differences between formal language learned at school and informal (often called natural) language learned at home. Michael T. Brown, a professor of education at U.C. Santa Barbara, called the article "a competently performed work, thought-provoking, and sensitive with respect to the issues of equity."
So while the University of California pursues its study, Freedle hopes that he is finally getting someplace after having his most provocative work stuffed into ETS file drawers. Nearly all those involved—ETS and College Board officials, University of California researchers, high school guidance counselors and admissions officers from those schools that would be affected by a change in the SAT—are, like Freedle, practical people with a seemingly distant but still compelling goal. They want to remove barriers that limit young people's choices in life. All of them, Freedle included, acknowledge that many other things, more difficult than devising a scoring supplement to a multiple-choice test, will have to be done to make that happen.