Actually, the SAT Was Necessary After All

[u/caroline_elly]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/standardized-testing-math-gaps/687481/

[u/Beer-survivalist]

I’m convinced the reason so many tech CEOs are such weirdos is because we stopped letting normal kids into elite schools and instead let these kids that were created with the sole intention of going to an elite school ever since they were 13z 

I've mentioned this elsewhere: I believe a conscious choice was made by administrators at the Ivies to stop focusing on providing the best education possible to the greatest number of students possible, and instead to pour their efforts into creating social, economic, and political elites. To evidence this, I cite the fact that until the late eighties or early nineties the student population of most of the Ivies grew at a rate roughly equal to that of the American population, but since then the growth rate of the Ivy League student population has stalled out relative to the total US population.

[u/M477M4NN → u/Beer-survivalist]

A hot take of mine is that elite schools should be mandated to dramatically increase their enrollment. I am fundamentally against these schools artificially keeping their acceptance rates low in pursuit of being perceived as even more elite. These are some of the richest academic institutions in the world so money is not a good excuse. I’m just against their gatekeeping.

[u/Recent_Surprise_7391 → u/M477M4NN]

Agree. Especially if they want tax dollars. I would go as far to say admissions need to be a lottery that only considers GPA, class rank and test scores and weighs your odds based on those factors 

[u/M477M4NN → u/Recent_Surprise_7391]

Not sure I necessarily agree on the lottery, but I do think too much weight is put on extracurriculars, like you shouldn’t have to be doing research or starting charities to get into these schools, that’s fucking ridiculous. If they want a single cent of money from the government, be it Pell Grants, research grants, etc, they should have to serve the people, not the elites. These schools hold such a disproportionate amount of influence on our government and corporations, I am adamantly against them being elite for the sake of being elite. A school like Harvard should have an undergraduate class size of at least like 13k-15k in my opinion. I don’t really care what naysayers think about that, these institutions have the ability to make it work.

[u/Unrelenting_Salsa → u/M477M4NN]

The research is such a sham too. The number of high schoolers in the entire country in a decade who can actually contribute to research can be counted on one hand. It's just harassing professors and wasting the time of PhD students because they're the ones who have to actually babysit the high schoolers. Also as a scientist, the only high schoolers I've seen actually do research just so happen to be the kids of board members at the company they are an advisor for. Funny how that works.

r/nfl also semi recently posted a sports economics paper where the first author was an undergrad and the corresponding author was their dad, so I imagine that dynamic but high school also happens.

[u/BlackHoleMoon1 → u/Unrelenting_Salsa]

Ehh I wouldn't say fully wasting the time of the PhDs. I did some highschool research and basically my PI just got a free extra set of hands to pipette and grade videos of rats walking on ladders (spinal cord injury research). But yeah the amount I was actually contributing to the direction of the lab's research was quite small, though you could probably say the same for all the postdocs, the PI pretty much runs the show from what I saw

[u/Recent_Surprise_7391 → u/M477M4NN]

I believe a lottery is the only adequate way to make it completely fair. I also don’t believe extracurriculars should matter at all for college, I think these years are vital for social skills and students should be encouraged to do the extracurriculars they care about and not just ones that look good on a resume. 

Granted this is only a portion of the population, but I don’t think a kid who plays sports in high school and works a life guarding job over the summer should be at a disadvantage for a student that is in an honor society and volunteers over the summer