Princeton's easy to get into, really. A whopping 1,600 out of 14,500 applicants are accepted each year, about 11 percent.
Just compare that to two-and-a-half year olds applying to New York City's 92nd Street Y preschool, which has a seven percent admission rate and quite a standard. Former Salomon Smith Barney stock analyst Jack Grubman wanted his twins to attend the school. He allegedly upgraded his rating on AT&T to get banking business and please his boss, who gave $1 million to the school. The children were accepted.
That Grubman wanted them to get in makes sense: a hot preschool will land a child in a top elementary and prep school, a pretty safe path to the Ivy League and its sister schools.
For a few decades, however, admission officers have wanted to admit not only well-prepped students, but also students with diverse intellects and backgrounds. Affirmative action and financial aid, though debated, have helped. However, problems have arisen when education leaders find that a part of the admission process treads against broadening the pool.
In January the University of California voted to replace the SAT after UC president Richard Atkinson decried the test as not testing what students learn. Around the same time, Yale University president Richard Levin called early admission unfair for forcing students to decide too early and limiting their aid choices.
Ten months later, the College Board has announced major reforms to the SAT. Yale and Stanford have replaced their binding early decision with non-binding early action. These are major decisions, the former changing the benchmark test in college admissions, and the latter shaking up the method by which thousands apply and are notified early of college admission decisions yearly.
But do they make sense?
SAT is to FAIR as . . .
In Feb. 2001 the latest in the SAT saga began when Atkinson called for an end to using the SAT in UC admissions. Speaking at an academic conference, he noted the $100 million-plus test preparation market and how low SAT scores affect morale.
"Anyone involved in education should be concerned about how overemphasis on the SAT is distorting educational priorities and practices," Atkinson said, "how the test is perceived by many as unfair, and how it can have a devastating impact on the self-esteem and aspirations of young students."
Though The College Board has hesitated to change the test, it has periodically responded to changes in education.
In contrast to the select few universities which used the test for most of the last century, 80 percent of four year colleges and universities now use it, and more than two million students take it each year.
The College Board was somewhat suspicious of Atkinson's motives, since designing a new test could boost the Latino presence on the UC campus, which could be politically expedient in California.
But UC dropping the SAT also would deal a serious financial blow to the College Board. Californians make up 12.6 percent of the 2.2 million annual test takers — a considerable piece of its annual $141 million revenues.
Atkinson and College Board representatives met a year ago to flesh out their worries.
Then this past summer, the College Board announced several major SAT reforms, effective 2005, including adding a writing section similar to the SAT II writing test, extending the math requirements and dropping analogies in favor of more reading tests. The test would also be 25 minutes longer.
Amy Schmitt, a College Board spokeswoman, said the new test's goal is "to make the test more reflective of the important skills needed in college."
Some education experts and officials said the changes to the SAT will broaden the test and make it more predictive of college success, but others expressed concern about the motives for the new test.
Tom Wolanin of the nonpartisan Institute for Higher Education, which stresses fairness in admission standards, said the new SAT would have some positive effects but will likely maintain the racial and socioeconomic disparities that the College Board itself admits are shown by the SAT.
"It probably reflects that lowincome and minority students receive less adequate secondary school education, particularly in writing," he said.
John Anderson, who heads college guidance at Phillips Academy at Andover, underscored the possible economic payoffs of the new test. "It will also give the test preparation companies a wholly new game to play," he said.
Fair Test, an organization opposing the mandatory submission of SAT scores, has dismissed the new SAT. Christina Perez, a representative, said it's a "marketing response.
"The speeded high-pressure multiple choice nature will still be a barrier for many students," she said.
According to Fair Test, the new writing section may intensify disparities. It says that African-American and Hispanic students score between 80 and 100 points lower than white students on the SAT II writing test.
In the mid-1990s, the College Board altered the SAT and readjusted the grading scale.
"If one keeps changing the SAT I, as the College Board and ETS have done on a number of occasions in recent years," Princeton Dean of Admission Fred Hargadon said, "one begins to have some doubt about which of these changes are being made to improve the reliability and validity of the test, and which are being made in an attempt to respond to political and/or commercial pressures."
Making the quick call
"Everyone involved in the early decision process admits that it rewards the richest students from the most exclusive high schools and penalizes nearly everyone else," wrote James Fallows in his landmark Sept. 2001 article in the Atlantic Monthly.
Fallows called on Ivy League leaders to abandon early decision, and last December, Yale president Levin answered. He said he wanted Ivy presidents to unify behind an end to early admission.
Aside from Harvard, which has early action, Ivy League schools did not capitulate.
Shocking the higher education world early this month, however, Yale acted unilaterally, ending early decision, effective next year. Stanford did the same.
"Early decision programs help colleges more than applicants," Levin said. "It is our hope to take pressure off students in the early cycle and restore a measure of reasoned choice to college admissions."
Levin emphasized how students who feel they must apply early to binding programs do not have the option of comparing financial aid offers.
Anny Gall, 17, of Charlotte, N.C., who is currently applying early to Yale, said she supported the switch. "I have friends who're applying early decision to Yale and may have rushed into that decision."
Gall applied early, she said, because she wanted to find out quickly, thought her chances would improve and knew Yale was her first choice.
According to expert Wolanin, switching to early action gives lowincome students choices closer to those of upper-income students.
Enid Margolis, principal of New York City's Martin Luther King high school, which sends about 75 percent of its seniors to college, said her students often don't apply early because "they really need to look for the best financial package. We don't want them to tie their choices to one school."
Levin formed his view partly after reviewing a 2001 Harvard study on early decision by social scientists Christopher Avery, Andrew Fairbanks and Richard Zeckhauser. Putting aside legacies, recruits and minorities, they found that early decision offers a major advantage over early action, worth roughly 100 points on the SAT. In 2001, at Princeton, 572 of 1,838 early applicants were accepted.
Princeton has aggressively defended early decision.
"I frankly do not understand the logic of Yale's decision," said President Tilghman. "Their version of early action still requires that students make a single, exclusive early choice, which surely requires precisely the same kind of speeding up of decision making that they claim they want to avoid by eliminating early decision."
Levin responded that early action is more consistent with "the stated goals of institutions such as Princeton and Yale because it encourages access to our schools for those without the means to pay the full term bill."
Tilghman said Levin "misses the point. He has stated clearly in the press that the problem with early decision is having students making a key decision about where to play their early card late in their junior year, when they are less mature . . . He has not solved the key issue with early action. The student still has to make one decision by Nov. 1."
An early glimpse
This fall the Ivy League received more early applications than ever. Experts believe college admission competition will continue to intensify until the end of the decade, when high school populations will dwindle.
There likely will be continued debates about the SAT and early admissions. U.S. News and World Report's rankings will continue to influence student choices. Universities will struggle to treat students fairly and keep the process open while simultaneously keeping up with market pressures. Early action may lead a school to receive more applications, for example, increasing its selectivity, a factor in compiling rankings. Alternatively, early decision allows universities to improve their yield — how many admitted students matriculate — another factor in the rankings.
For years the College Board maintained that test preparation products could not raise scores, but now it concedes that these products can help and even sells its own. Just on Saturday, several reports indicated that executives of the Educational Testing Service, which designs the SAT, received $2 million in bonuses for running surpluses for the firm.
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