College, Calculus, and the Problem With the SAT

It’s September, and all across the country high school seniors are setting up their Common Application accounts, retaking SATs, and struggling to write (or procrastinating the writing of) 650 words that convey, in a tidy narrative, who they are, the challenges they have overcome in their 17 years on Earth, and why, Dear College Admissions Person, they really deserve to attend Your Excellent University!

Depending on the circumstances they were born into, students might see these tasks as steps toward claiming a birthright or as giant obstacles that stand between them and a future of economic security. The former are helped along by tutors, consultants, and nagging parents; the latter scrape up money for test-taking fees and get what help they can from overworked school counselors. In his new book, The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, Paul Tough explores this divide, and interrogates whether going to college has become a privilege of wealth and whether it can still lift people out of economic insecurity.

Over six years, Tough visited big universities and small liberal arts colleges and community colleges, speaking with more than a hundred students. He writes movingly about students who are trying to navigate the confounding, expensive, and intimidating process of getting into and staying in college. Tough has written several books about education. This new book has some pretty depressing moments—especially about the current state of standardized testing. But he also finds plenty to be hopeful about.

WIRED: You’ve written a lot about education—about how important it is for children to have interaction in the preschool years and about teaching grit and perseverance in school. But this book, about what happens after K–12, is the one you call “The Years That Matter Most.” Why does college matter more than those other stages of education?

Paul Tough: At its heart, this book is about social mobility: the ability of young people, especially those growing up in families without a lot of money, to improve their prospects as adults. When you look at the economic data, what’s striking about this moment in American history is how intertwined higher education and social mobility have become. The choices you make in the years after high school—and the choices that are made for you—are now more crucial than ever in shaping the trajectory of your life.

As to why this is true here and now more than at other moments: I think it’s mostly about scarcity. Because we’ve set up our system of higher education to be so competitive, so winner-take-all, those years have taken on outsize importance. A system of social mobility that puts so much pressure and responsibility on the decision-making abilities of millions of idiosyncratic 18-year-olds is not a particularly stable or effective one.

WIRED: What do you mean by scarcity? Certainly there are thousands of colleges students can choose from. Are you talking specifically about students getting into what are perceived to be the “best” colleges?

Tough: Yes. A distressing study by the Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby argues, pretty convincingly, that it really does matter where you go to college. The most selective institutions, she found, spend a lot more on each undergraduate than other colleges do, and they give a significant boost in lifetime earnings, on average, to the students they enroll.

I have to quickly point out to the nation’s stressed-out high school seniors and their parents that Hoxby’s finding was only an average effect. And the “best college” for any given student is still a subjective individual question. But Hoxby confirmed through data what many anxious students and parents and counselors suspect: Higher education has become increasingly stratified, with very different outcomes for students at different points on that selectivity ladder. That fact is at the root of that “scarcity” mindset. And it’s a problem—especially because those high-spending, high-mobility institutions are dominated by students from wealthy families.

WIRED: Wasn’t standardized testing was meant to create a more equal playing field, creating a mechanism for accepting students based on merit? You’re pretty critical of standardized testing—the SAT in particular. How do you think that effort has failed?

Tough: In Nicholas Lemann’s excellent history of the SAT, The Big Test, he shows that it didn’t take long after the SAT’s introduction, decades ago, for people to notice that the test was actually replicating the class hierarchies that it was supposedly designed to disrupt. It has more or less always been true that the SAT, on balance, benefits college applicants who already enjoy lots of financial and social advantages.

I spent a lot of time with an excellent and very expensive SAT tutor in suburban Washington, DC, named Ned Johnson. I sat and observed as Ned helped one affluent student after another make huge gains in their test scores. After that experience, it’s harder to be surprised by the news that SAT scores track so closely with family income.

And on the other end of the process, I met a lot of low-income college students who had great high school grades but only mediocre SAT scores. Because of a variety of admissions quirks and strokes of luck, these students were attending colleges that were much more selective than their SAT scores would normally have allowed them into. And they were doing great! Their high school grades had turned out to be much better predictors of their academic ability and college potential than their SAT scores. But in an admissions system that puts a lot of emphasis on test scores—which is what exists at almost every selective college and university—students like those never get a chance to realize their potential.

WIRED: But despite the growing number of small colleges that are now “test optional,” I wonder how big universities can practically handle admissions without standardized tests, given the number of students who apply. They need some way to quickly cull the field. Did you come away from your research thinking there could be a real alternative?

Tough: I did! As it happened, a lot of my reporting took place at the University of Texas in Austin, and UT has an unusual admissions system. Two decades ago, the Texas legislature passed a law requiring UT to automatically accept high school seniors from anywhere in Texas whose high school grades placed them close to the top of their class. Those automatic admits now make up at least two-thirds of every incoming freshman class at UT. The admissions process for that part of the class isn’t just “test optional”—it’s more like “test blind.” UT’s admissions officials are forbidden by law from considering those students’ SAT scores in deciding whom to admit.

That has helped to create an unusual student body at UT. Each freshman class includes some excellent students from the wealthy suburbs of Dallas, who have test scores and family incomes and demographic profiles that match freshmen at selective colleges anywhere in the country. But it also includes plenty of excellent students from rural West Texas and the Rio Grande Valley and Houston’s Third Ward—many of whom have much lower SAT and ACT scores and much lower family incomes. If they lived in Michigan or Virginia or North Carolina, they would be unlikely to be admitted to their state’s flagship university. But in Texas, their hard work in high school earns them admission to the finest university in the state. And generally, once they get there, they succeed.

WIRED: There are people, especially in tech, who point to Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and argue that you don’t need a college education for success. There are even billionaires like Peter Thiel who have actively encouraged would-be entrepreneurs to drop out and just start their companies. You dropped out of college yourself! Do you think college is necessary for everyone?

Tough: Yes, my dark secret: I dropped out of college, and yet I didn’t manage to start a billion-dollar corporation! Where did I go wrong?

I certainly don’t think everyone needs a four-year college degree. But I came away from my reporting convinced that almost every young American needs some kind of post-high-school credential. It is exceedingly difficult, in today’s economy, to find a career that will allow you to support a family and achieve a middle-class existence armed with only a high school diploma.

And in that context, stories like Zuckerberg’s or Gates’—or even mine—are more likely to be a distraction than an inspiration. Yes, it’s still possible to succeed in today’s economy without a college degree. But those success stories are very rare, and it is much, much easier to succeed with a degree than without one.

WIRED: One of my favorite chapters was about a calculus class.

Tough: Sitting through Uri Treisman’s freshman calculus class at the University of Texas was a humbling experience. There’s nothing like the feeling of spending four months surrounded by a hundred 18-year-olds who are all smarter than you are.

Treisman’s course is enormously challenging—he makes sure his students understand not just how to do high-level calculus problems but also the mathematical principles behind those problems—and his students work very hard. But it’s also a kind of psychological hothouse.

Freshman calculus class has become such an important gatekeeper for college success. It’s the single biggest class at UT. More than a thousand students take it each year. If you don’t do well in freshman calculus it’s very hard to go on to earn a STEM degree. And over the last couple of decades, there’s been a rapid but uneven growth of students taking AP Calculus in high school. Low-income students are much less likely to attend schools that offer AP Calculus—and then they often end up in freshman calculus at college sitting next to lots of well-off students who have already taken the equivalent of freshman calculus in high school.

Treisman has a particular genius for teaching the class. He’s absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge about student psychology and math education. He and his instructors have two main strategies. The first encourages them, from day one, to think of themselves as leaders on campus and to acquaint them with research that top scientists and engineers are doing. They really welcome them into a community of science and math, as well as the community of UT Austin. The second strategy involves the math questions he and his team choose. He wants to make the problems challenging enough to shake up the students’ confidence and disrupt their often superficial understanding of calculus—all of which leads to a real boost in confidence when they’re finally able to figure out the answers. As a result, the course has a transformative effect on many students.

It’s an uneven playing field, and Uri Treisman is doing his best to make it more level.

WIRED: What was it like being back in a college classroom?

Tough: Kind of fun, to be honest! I mean, there was the humiliation of not being able to do the math. But once I got over that, the opportunity to really get to know so many students and talk at length with them about the transformative process they were going through—not just mathematically but psychologically—was pretty cool.

It didn’t quite make me want to reenroll and finish my BA. But it made me appreciate of just how and why those college years can have such a powerful impact on a young person’s trajectory.