Byron Auguste: belief

Transcript context

…But it tracks IQ pretty closely. And a lot of Asian schools way overemphasize standard testing, I would say, and they’ve risen to very high levels of quality very quickly. It just seems like a good thing to do. I think there’s a much bigger problem. To me, the bigger problem is this. There is a greater demand for higher education, and rightly so, but if you look at the number of quality seats in higher education in this country, they’ve grown very little. In a period where we’ve gone from almost no one had a college degree . . . By the way, high schools were to get the jobs of the future. High schools were not developed as a way to get into college. High schools were developed as a way to get into a good job, jobs of the future at that time. Now, in 1983, with the nation at risk, we suddenly decided, “Oh, point of high school is for everyone to go to college.” No one had told high schools up until that point. Now that that’s the case, the basic problem is, if you keep the number of college seats constant, and you demand that everybody try to go to college — and in fact, if businesses, to some extent, weaponize college degrees by saying, “Oh, if you don’t have a college degree, you can’t get into a decent job” — well then, suddenly you’ve got a huge demand for college degrees, and you’ve got basically mostly fixed supply. What happens, as an economist? What happens is, you create this horrible zero-sum bottleneck in the talent-development system and in the signaling system. So yes, you can debate what should be the signals that allow people to go to college. But the fact of the matter is, we should have 50 percent more, maybe twice as many high-quality seats in college. That’s the problem. Affirmative action and testing and issues like this become life-or-death issues because we put way too much weight on that bottleneck. What we really need is more quality college seats, and we need many more valid alternative routes. That should be not just for people who are 18, 19, 20, but people in their 20s, people in their 30s, people in their 40s, people in their 50s because jobs are changing all the time, and we need all the talents. It is absolutely not the case that people stop learning. That’s what we need. I think a lot of this is a second-order distraction because what we actually need is more of the good thing, not just different ways of screening people out. If you’re agnostic on standardized testing, what is it you think we should be measuring more as an admissions input?…

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