Testing, Athlete Labor & the FAFSA

Key Moments

(0:00) - Introduction
(3:21) - Test-optional admissions and its impact on students and institutions
(8:45) - AI in admissions
(13:45) - College athletes as employees and potential changes in college sports
(19:29) - Future of the NCAA
(22:58) - FAFSA delays and their impact on higher education
(28:03) - Higher education challenges

Transcript

Michael Horn:

Hey, it's Michael here. Jeff and I delved into a bunch of depressing issues facing higher ed right now in this episode, but we want you to know that we recorded it on February 14th before the news about Yale going back to the tests broke and some other developments as well. Just so you have context as you listen to the full episode. Jeff, when it comes to one-on-one shows with you, I've noticed that we love unpacking acronyms, so much so that we are doing it again on this show.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah. Well, Michael, every field has its acronyms to make it easier to communicate, although sometimes I fear that it does the opposite in higher ed. And so today we're going to delve into the SAT and ACT, the NLRB, the FASFA and more on this episode of Future U.

Sponsor:

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low-income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org. This episode is brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity, and income as predictors of student success through innovation, data and information, policy and institutional transformation.

Jeff Selingo:

I'm Jeff Selingo.

Michael Horn:

And I'm Michael Horn. All right, Jeff, let's dive right in. It seemed that every selective college and university was going test optional once COVID hit and that it might stay that way. And then as you've written, MIT reversed course, and now the latest news, Dartmouth has said that they are reinstating mandatory submission of the SAT or ACT as well. As I said, this is a topic you've written a lot about and you know a lot about it. You were quoted in David Leonhardt's writeup of this in the New York Times, and if folks had read your most recent book, they would've seen some juicy nuggets about how these SAT and ACT test scores are actually used in college admissions. Often to identify students from unfamiliar schools, often with more low-income students who would do well on a given campus and it's sort of hard to evaluate their transcript for the admissions officers. So what's going on though here at Dartmouth, and do you expect more selective schools to follow suit? Has test optional perhaps had its moment and now it's just going to fade into another fad in higher ed?

Jeff Selingo:

Well, I think, the short answer, Michael, is no, at least in the next few years, in fact, some institutions, including Harvard have actually announced multi-year test optional extensions. So we're still going through a couple more years. I have a feeling we'll see a few more. I think the next domino to fall is your alma mater, Yale.

Michael Horn:

No way. Okay.

Jeff Selingo:

And then maybe the rest of the Ivies, just mainly because of the way folks there have been talking and we kind of knew that Dartmouth would probably be first again, because of the way Lee Coffin, who's the dean of admissions at Dartmouth has been talking in recent months. Now others are really still continuing to study it. And when I've talked to a number of admissions deans in recent weeks, and that includes at Vanderbilt and at Duke and a few other places, what they're finding is there is no significant differences between the students they admitted with tests and those that they admitted without tests in terms of GPA and graduation rates so far.

But that's a pretty small end so far because remember, you're really only talking about one class that has been through for the most part, if that, depending on exactly when we're talking about they went test optional. So for the most part they're really only looking at GPAs right now and this year they'll finally have graduation rates by four years. I think they really want a couple more years to study this because, I think, what they really want to look at, according to my conversations with them, is how is it impacted by majors. So are there certain majors where maybe test optional students aren't performing as well as those students who came in with test scores. And are there certain courses, particularly gateway courses in some majors where students maybe, again, without test scores, are struggling.

And, I think, the biggest problem with all of this study is the impact of COVID learning. It's really hard to untangle, is this an issue because they didn't submit a score or is this an issue because we know there was a lot of learning loss during COVID. And, I think, that's going to be a big piece of how they're studying this over the next couple of years. Finally, what is the faculty role in all this? I was talking to an admissions dean at a selective private university that is test optional the other day, and he said older faculty members are complaining about kids these days and they're blaming it on the fact that this institution went test optional during the pandemic and isn't going back. And there's definitely a split on the faculty, I think, at most of these selective colleges. I think in the sciences and math, in STEM fields, you will see faculty who want to go back to testing.

And it's largely because of the math issues that we're seeing everywhere where students just don't have high quality math coming out of high school because again, of COVID and probably in arts and sciences you're seeing less of it. So the question is how much of a role does the faculty have in bringing back the test. And the story that I did for New York Magazine last year at MIT, the faculty had a huge role in bringing it back there. And so what is faculty governance in these other places to bring this back. I think if anyone's going to push it, I think, it will be the faculty. I think it'll be a generation of faculty and, I think, it will be faculty in certain disciplines.

Michael Horn:

Gosh, that sparks so many thoughts for me, including whether you might see Bespoke tests depending on institution in the longer run. But among follow-up questions, I'll try to do them rapid fire. So for starters, why are people pushing back on using these tests to begin with?

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, I mean, I think, one of them is the specter of students not applying because they require the test. Every college that went test optional during the pandemic saw huge increases in applications and they attribute a lot of those applications to the fact that they were test optional. So it's clear that Dartmouth is definitely going to see a decrease in applications from this. And the question is, are boards okay with that since it's often used as a measure of popularity. And the second is that the other reason that they're pushing back on this is one that we've known for years of research, is that there's a high correlation between high test scores and income. And at a time when selective colleges are under fire for not being diverse enough, particularly on the socioeconomic front, the David Deming and Raj Chetty research that shows that, I think, it's going to be really hard for some of them to say, okay, we're going to come back to the test.

Michael Horn:

Well, so that bleeds I guess into the next question I have, which is who is test optional really benefiting? Because what you just said there is somewhat at odds with what, I think, you found in the book around how these are actually used.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah. And we could talk about specific students. In the book, obviously Chris, who I followed, rural student in Pennsylvania, he would've never been found by a lot of colleges if he didn't take the SAT and hit it out of the park. Now I could tell you I would've actually benefited from test optional because I wasn't a great test taker, so my grades would've been highlighted a little bit more than the testing. In general though, I think, we should look less at the individual benefit here and who does it really benefit generally, students or institutions. And it really does benefit the institutions being test optional. In a recent interview with Christoph Guttentag, who's the dean of admissions at Duke, he thinks that institutions are largely going to live in the middle going forward. And what do I mean by the middle? On one side you have test-free, you have the University of California system and a couple of other institutions that say, we don't want the test at all.

And then on the other side, you have those who require the test. Now, Dartmouth, MIT, a couple of publics in the south, but the largest group of institutions are test-optional, that's in the middle, and he thinks that most institutions are going to live in the middle. And I asked him, well, is that better for you or is that better for the applicant? And as he told me, every admissions dean has the responsibility, their first responsibility is to their institution, and this provides them the most flexibility in leaning into institutional priorities, whatever they might be. They might want more STEM students from the Midwest. They might want more low-income students from particular high schools, whatever that might be, not requiring test scores gives them the flexibility to craft that class whatever way they want.

Michael Horn:

That's interesting. So are those that are maybe pushing for the test to be required, is the real problem then here at the root of it, grade inflation? In my view that teachers just continued, I don't think they should be grading their students period, but is it just that schools increasingly feel like we can't trust the grades themselves?

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, I believe that. If you talk to a lot of high school teachers and counselors, they believe that. Now if you get involved in the debate on Twitter or X around test-optional, people who believe, who support test-optional don't believe that there is grade inflation. So that just seems to be a bedrock belief that if you support test-optional, you don't believe that there is grade inflation. But again, talk to high school teachers and counselors, go to a high school and they'll say something different. I also believe that there's so many parts of the application, Michael, now that can be gamed. There is grade inflation. There's essays now that can be helped by ChatGPT. There's Test Prep. You could connect with companies and pay them, that will give you research opportunities to put on your resume. So there's so many things that can be gamed as part of the application.

Where I actually like to take this is where AI, I think, is already helping and could potentially help. I was talking to the dean of admissions at Emory, which as you know was part of my last book, and they're testing AI on transcripts. So there's less of a worry about grades and more of a worry about just the huge variety in high school transcripts. 25,000 plus high schools in the US alone and every single person uses a different grading scale. There's different ways of describing classes as honors, as AP, as advanced or whatever. And so they're testing now using AI at Emory, is there a way where you could kind of scrub all of those transcripts coming in so that the transcript looks similar between different high schools when the admissions officer is actually looking at it. That to me is a much bigger issue than grade inflation alone, is what is a college admissions officer actually looking at when they look at the transcript because they are so different between high schools.

Michael Horn:

That's interesting, especially with people like me being annoying, pushing for competency-based learning and stuff. But one other piece of this, the SAT of course has undergone a big change. This March, it's the first time it's become an adaptive digital test, which means, I think, it'll be shorter and it'll feel different to the test taker. How does that play into all these dynamics in your view?

Jeff Selingo:

Well, I think, it's important for places like MIT and Dartmouth that are going back to the test, they need volume. They need a number of students taking the test. Volume had decreased during the pandemic, it started going back up. And so it is really a requirement for them if you're going to require the test that enough students take it. So for example, going back to that Chris in my book, they could find students like that. Also, the buying of names of the SAT is also changing because of the digital SAT and rules on student privacy. So volume is important. So because the test is going to be shorter, it's going digital, the hope is that more students will take it. One interesting tidbit here that I've been hearing from admissions deans is they're wondering if they could potentially keep testing optional, but then ask for scores after the fact. Because they know, after the fact of admission, because they know that many students are still taking the test and then deciding not to send their scores.

And what they would want to know is could we have those scores. After we've made our admissions decisions, could we actually have those scores just for our research purposes so that when you come and come into our institution and we could track you through your undergraduate years, we have a much bigger [inaudible 00:13:17], in terms of students with test scores. So then when we do this research on how students are performing in gateway courses and different majors, we have enough scores to really make an assessment for how they're doing. Now, that might by the way, mean that they require testing in a couple of years down the road if they have enough of that data. But the problem right now is if you're test-optional, you may not have enough data in certain majors if not enough students are submitting scores.

Michael Horn:

Okay. Last question on this topic, which is are people like us or maybe not us but the media more generally, guilty of over-hyping all of this? Like the vast majority of colleges in America are not highly selective. I think you can tell me the exact number perhaps, but fewer than 100 colleges, certainly accept fewer than 25% of students, I think. So for many of those other schools, the thousands of colleges and universities, does this conversation really matter, Jeff?

Jeff Selingo:

No, it's more like 59, Michael. I was just looking at this.

Michael Horn:

59.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, I was just looking at this data this morning for something else. 59 schools essentially in the most recent year, accepted fewer than 25% of students. So it's a pretty small group. I think there's a bigger issue here around our relationship with testing. Most parents of college kids today or high school students, took the test themselves. They believe it's a rite of passage. I think there's a lot of debate right now about the merit in admissions and what it takes to get into college. There's a belief that there needs to be some sort of bar to get in and that bar is standardized tests. I mean, if you go into any parent group, and I spend a lot of time in parent groups on Facebook and Reddit and other places, there seems to be and again this is anecdotal, I haven't taken a survey of them. Most parents want to bring it back. Now, maybe it's just because the parent groups I'm in, the hyper-competitive parent groups where most of kids now are getting deferred or denied. But it's clear that parents, they took the test and they feel that this would be one reason or this would be one way to reduce this huge application inflation that we've seen over the last couple of years, if we brought the test back.

Michael Horn:

So homecoming prom, SATs and apple pie, I got it.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah. You got it.

Michael Horn:

It's what we want. All right, so let's stay up in Hanover as we transition. Hanover, New Hampshire, that is, and Dartmouth. Jeff, as you know, a regional NLRB office ruled that Dartmouth's basketball team, they're all employees and that they have the right to unionize. My wife is a Dartmouth Alum and their basketball team is one and six in the Ivies at the time that we're recording this, they'll probably be worse by the time this goes live. That was five wins and 15 losses overall. They haven't been in the NCAA tournament since 1958. I could go on, but I'm going to give my wife a break. Suffice to say Dartmouth is not a powerhouse basketball team. And when we think of athletes-

Jeff Selingo:

I don't know if you could call them a basketball team. But I shouldn't say that. I probably shouldn't say that.

Michael Horn:

We can decide whether we want to edit it out later. When we think of athletes, Jeff, as employees, it's fair to say Dartmouth basketball is not what comes to mind. And yet get this, all 15 members of their team signed a petition seeking to unionize this past fall. So I guess they want to pay union dues or something. But I guess the thing, Jeff, is this, Dartmouth, even if it loses money on men's basketball, even if they and all the Ivies for that matter, don't give out athletic scholarships, they do generate revenue from basketball. They charge for tickets. This is not like a club sport or an independent organization like The Dartmouth, the oldest college newspaper since, I think, 1799, which is an independent 501(c)(3) and completely separate from the college. And because the athletics department in effect, charges revenue and because they exert "significant control" over the team members' schedules and activities, the NLRB said the team is performing services for the university, and that in the regional office's view made them employees. Now, we should know Dartmouth is appealing this ruling so we're going to see what happens. But aside from that bigger picture, where does this all go in your view and should we care?

Jeff Selingo:

So Michael, to channel Matt Brown, who we've had on the podcast before and is the editor of the Extra Points newsletter, the law does not care how much revenue something generates or even if it is profitable at all. That is not what determines employee status. So as you said, Dartmouth's basketball team might not be very good, as Matt points out, it tracks probably fewer fans than some high school basketball games, but it doesn't really matter. There is so much institutional control here. The equipment, the training, the services. Highly structured, highly controlled, and all of that benefits the institution and that's what really matters around here. Now, where does this go? Michael, I just think we're in a moment in college sports that started with realignment last year or two years ago now, of the different conferences, of name, image and likeness. I think this is going to be the next domino to fall is employee status.

And when that happens, boy, all bets are off. I just think we're going to see massive changes to college sports. And I will tell you, when I talk to most college presidents and boards, they're kind of asleep at the wheel here. I don't think they're really paying that much attention to it. I think both you and I are pretty big college sports fans, so we pay much more attention to it and maybe there is the outlier president who does. But this is, I don't think as much on their radar as it should be because, I think, in the next couple of years between this name, image, likeness, more conference realignment, changes in television contracts, all the stuff that we've talked about before on this podcast, I think, that this is a watershed moment in college sports.

Michael Horn:

Yeah, Jeff, I mean, I think, it's going to lead to some big decisions. Some of these schools, I would say spin out your athletics program, make it affiliated for-profit or something like that. It can still have a connection for alumni, et cetera. It could be your athletes, but make it a real profit and loss business to pay them. Or frankly, for the Dartmouths of the world, maybe go club for your basketball team. Stop charging, I suppose, for tickets. I mean, is that revenue really worth it for Dartmouth? I would have my questions. I suppose they could pull out of the NCAA altogether so that there's more flexibility to the student schedules. Because the last time I checked, and I'll go to Yale here, like the Yale Symphony Orchestras students, they're not employees, I don't think, but they do charge for concerts. Same with singing groups on college campuses. But, I think, the difference is that there's less control, I would assume, over their schedules and what they are and are not allowed to do. But I guess all to say, I do wonder how slippery the slope is and if this is really where we want to go here. I would think you'd want to be careful that you don't have students participating in student clubs who are all of a sudden considered part-time workers or contractors or something, Jeff.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah. I think, Michael, we know there's different divisions in collegiate sports between division one, division two and division three, but, I think, the divide is just going to become wider even within division one. We know that famous NCAA commercial where they talk about student athletes going pro and something else beside college athletics, but we know that's not true. At most of the very top universities where they are going to go pro, I think those institutions will break off. I think they'll be controlled by some other entity besides the NCAA. Maybe it's the conferences. I think then everybody else pulls out of essentially the NCAA as we know it today, and a new entity perhaps grows up and division three sports particularly, I think, looks very different. But I don't think that we're going to be able to say in five or six years, be able to talk about this idea of college athletics.

I think there's going to be division one and subdivision one college athletics. I think there's going to be big college athletics that's going to be different from division one. I think there's going to be small college athletics, but it's not going to be this unifying force that, I think, it has been for generations for everybody else. And so with that, Michael, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to come back and talk a little bit about another acronym, the FAFSA, which is causing a lot of heartache now, not only for the education department, but for a lot of parents and counselors out there as well. We'll be right back on Future U.

Sponsor:

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low-income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system level change and a student-centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post-secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first-generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners, and rural community members. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

This episode is being brought to you by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Today's college students are more than just students. They're workers, parents and caregivers and neighbors and colleges and universities need to change to meet their changing needs. Learn more about the foundation's efforts to transform institutions to be more student-centered at usprogram.gatesfoundation.org.

Michael Horn:

Welcome back to Future U and the last acronym of the day. We're going to leave the state of New Hampshire, travel down to your neck of the woods inside the beltway, Jeff, and we're going to talk FAFSA. Free Application For Student Aid. We're going to try to do more on this topic soon, of course, Jeff, with a full show. But I just think the ripple effects from the delays that have occurred over the last several months in getting this new FAFSA out. We've made reference to it on an earlier show that we had with Chris Quintana and John Marcus on the Reporter's Round Table. But it just seems like every time the Department of Education says it's going to get fixed, there's another crippling delay announced or the website doesn't really work or it's not indexed for inflation, on and on and on. And now with the latest delay at the time that we're recording this, schools, it was announced won't receive student financial aid information until mid-March.

Well, there's going to be a real ripple effect from that because schools then have to start adjusting their own timelines for accepted students to have to commit because financial aid letters aren't going to be able to be mailed out until April, which means that schools that say have a May 1st deadline are going to have to push things back. It just seems like a total mess, Jeff. But what's the longer term perspective on this in your mind?

Jeff Selingo:

Well, first of all, it's going to get fixed. What that means though, it's unclear. I think there's a couple of impacts of the changes that we won't really see for maybe a couple of months, maybe another year. There's impact, I'm hearing from financial aid directors and others around how farmers are treated in this, farm families. We know multiple students in college is a big issue. Multiple children in college, I should say, from a single family. Obviously, there's going to be a Pell expansion coming out of this, and I'm hearing from some financial aid directors of this idea where they're finding students whose financial profile that they see in something called the CSS Profile. So this is a college board product, which a bunch of more elite colleges also require students to fill out that's different than the FAFSA, that allows them to look more deeply into a family's financial profile.

I'm hearing from them that they're finding some students who they're calling Pellionaires. These are students who could qualify for a Pell Grant even though they have a lot of assets. And I am a little worried about, remember that stereotype back in the 1970s of the Welfare Queen owing a Cadillac and what that did to change and led to eventually welfare reform, both in the '80s and '90s. I'm starting to wonder if we're going to see the same thing in the next couple of years where you're going to see some enterprise reporter find a student on a Pell Grant or a partial Pell Grant who's actually a millionaire and what impact that might have on the Pell Grant program overall. Which would be a shame because it really has allowed, as we know, millions and hundreds of millions of students over the years to go to college.

But overall, Michael, in terms of the longer-term perspective here, I do worry about trust in higher ed. This is really a federal government issue, but there is a little bit here, I think, where people are blaming higher ed. I'm also wondering, by the way, how this might play out in the election. I think there's a lot of frustrated parents out there. I'm not saying that they're going to vote based on this one issue, but it might just again, go back to trust both in organizations and institutions in general, both higher education as well as the federal government. We also see there's a lot of debate between Congress and the ED department on this. The ED department's blaming Congress for not giving them enough money to implement this, and Congress is blaming the ED department for kind of keeping their eye on other things and not focused enough on this.

I do think, by the way, and just one final thought on this, this is one reason not to do a lot of these one-off bills to fix things in education policy. We haven't had a Reauthorization of Higher Education Act in a very long time, decade plus. And most of the time things like this would've been included in a total scrub, top to bottom of the Higher Education Act. There would've been a lot more debate on this, a lot more hearings on this. And basically since the 2008, I think, it was Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, we haven't had a full-on bill like that. And so we tend to do these like, okay, well we want to fix this. Let's have a bill on that. We want to do a fix on this. Let's have a bill on that. And, I think, we lose the whole as a result.

Michael Horn:

That's interesting, Jeff, because that's actually been the philosophy of the Republicans, is to do one-off rather than try to tackle it all. So that's an interesting insight. I will say my outside perception is that the Department of Education has been spending just way too much time focusing on how to relieve student debt, which honestly they knew was probably going to get ruled to be illegal, rather than doing the blocking and tackling of things that had actually been approved by Congress. And it's this move, this is the other macro thing, I guess, it's this move to regulate outside of statute that's gotten them into these problems, in my view. But I guess there's another subtext to this as well, which goes to your trust point, which, I think, ironically, tragically, whatever adverb you want to insert there, the administration constantly harping on the need to relieve student debt, has sort of pushed the news that higher ed is expensive more and more into the headlines.

And it's made people arguably more cautious, not less so, about going to college because all they hear is debt, unaffordable, won't be able to pay it back, on and on and on. And you get this on top of that, I do worry about how many people are just going to say, I don't trust this higher ed deal. I'm steering clear and I worry about who does that mean the colleges and universities are going to start to lose. I suspect it's going to be more low and middle income students, Jeff, not the upper income part of the spectrum.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah. And I'm not quite sure what the fix could have been. I've asked many times, why couldn't the ED department just go to Congress and say, we're not ready, give us another year. And obviously we would've had to do that many months ago. And everybody said, well, that's naive, because Congress would never say that and nor would they not only not allow that, but they would never probably appropriate more money to the Education Department anyway. And so this was probably inevitable in many ways. And it's just a real shame because there are so many good things to the new FAFSA, and, I think, a lot of that's been lost in this kind of pretty terrible rollout of it. But again, I think, it's going to get fixed, what the consequences of that, of the FAFSA are going to be we won't really know for six to eight months in terms of both enrollment, but also these changes and how that's going to impact student behavior and who's in college and who's paying for college and so forth. But Michael, I think, we've run out of acronyms. Do you think?

Michael Horn:

For now, for now. We're not going to go down the A, B, C, so to speak, of higher ed acronyms.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah. I'm sure our audience is thankful for that. And thank you, all of you out there for joining us. And don't forget to follow us on social media and the web at Future U podcast on X and on Instagram. Be sure to give us those reviews on whatever your podcast player is. They're really important to having other people find us. And don't forget to follow me at J Selingo on social and the next newsletter, which you could subscribe to on jeffselingo.com. You can find Michael at Michael B Horn on social and his newsletter, The Future of Education on Substack and his website, michaelbhorn.com. Until next time, we'll see you on Future U.