Luxury ideas
Excerpts from Dropping the SAT Requirement Is a Luxury Belief:
Elite colleges are eliminating standardized tests before they eliminate legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know.
The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.” But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, stack their resumes with extracurriculars, and use the right slogans in their admissions essays. They have “polish.”
Applicants from the most affluent families excel at these games. A study at Stanford found that family income is more highly correlated with admissions essay content than with SAT scores. Applicants from well-to-do backgrounds are especially adept at crafting their essays in ways that please admissions committees.
Interestingly, despite the chatter about getting rid of the SAT and the GRE, there is no talk of eliminating the ASVAB military test. No one says that it’s biased, unreliable, or discriminatory.
There are two reasons for this.
In the military, actions have real consequences. People want service members to be held to a high standard. For military recruits, a pencil and paper test is a reasonable requirement. But for those interested in studying at a place of higher learning, it’s a bridge too far.
The military is viewed as a lower middle-class organization. Influential members of society know their kids won’t be joining. So they don’t care about military entry standards the way they do for college and grad school.
More people are starting to realize many of these doctrines, for lack of a better term, are “luxury ideas”. These ideas are made by those in power as a means to retaining power, just like all the nonsense with the the recent medical hysteria that wiped out small business, kept working class children out of schools, and severed communities — all while major corporations consolidated their power.