A new NY Times analysis finds that rich kids score far higher on SATs/ACTs than poor kids, which is news something akin to "the sun is a burny hot fusion sphere" because it was true when I was in college 30 years ago, but it's even more true now and to an even more astonishing degree.
New data shows, for the first time at this level of detail, how much students’ standardized test scores rise with their parents’ incomes — and how disparities start years before students sit for tests.
One-third of the children of the very richest families scored a 1300 or higher, while less than 5 percent of middle-class students did, according to the data, from economists at Opportunity Insights, based at Harvard. Relatively few children in the poorest families scored that high; just one in five took the test at all.
The researchers matched all students’ SAT and ACT scores for 2011, 2013 and 2015 with their parents’ federal income tax records for the prior six years. Their analysis, which also included admissions and attendance records, found that children from very rich families are overrepresented at elite colleges for many reasons, including that admissions offices give them preference. But the test score data highlights a more fundamental reason: When it comes to the types of achievement colleges assess, the children of the rich are simply better prepared.
The disparity highlights the inequality at the heart of American education: Starting very early, children from rich and poor families receive vastly different educations, in and out of school, driven by differences in the amount of money and time their parents are able to invest. And in the last five decades, as the country has become more unequal by income, the gap in children’s academic achievement, as measured by test scores throughout schooling, has widened.
“Kids in disadvantaged neighborhoods end up behind the starting line even when they get to kindergarten,” said Sean Reardon, the professor of poverty and inequality in education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
“On average,” he added, “our schools aren’t very good at undoing that damage.”
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision ending race-based affirmative action, there has been revived political momentum to address the ways in which many colleges favor the children of rich and white families, such as legacy admissions, preferences for private school students, athletic recruitment in certain sports and standardized tests.
Yet these things reflect the difference in children’s opportunities long before they apply for college, Professor Reardon said. To address the deeper inequality in education, he said, “it’s 18 years too late.”
The children of the top 0.1 percent, whose parents earned an average of $11.3 million a year in today’s dollars, got far better scores than even the children of the families just below them, the new data shows. For the 12,000 students in this group, opportunities that drive achievement were amplified — exclusive private schools, summers traveling the world and college prep services that cost more than college itself — said John N. Friedman, an economist at Brown, who analyzed the new data with Raj Chetty and David J. Deming of Harvard.
But the larger inequality is between the children of the merely rich and those below them. As class differences have grown more extreme, and a college degree has become more crucial to achieving a middle-class lifestyle or better, it has bred competition among parents anxious about their children’s futures.
“People are kind of jockeying to get into the school district that they think is going to be most beneficial for their kid,” said Ann Owens, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, who studies inequality in education. “A lot of this is driven by rising income inequality. When people have more money to spend on stuff, they’re spending it on moving to an affluent neighborhood, or buying their kids test prep and tutors and all these things they think will help them.”
And why wouldn't parents help their kids with college test prep? Mine did. The more money you have available, the more assistance you can buy. It's an investment that pays off in the millions over the course of a career.
And remember, these numbers are from ten years ago, 2011, 2013, and 2015. It's even worse now in the post-pandemic, assistive-AI, post-affirmative action era of 2023 which we're only now starting to experience.
The book on this era of college admissions is being written now, and if you thought disparity was bad before, well...
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