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Hello and

this is Wednesday, March 20th, 2024, and this is a special episode of the many ways the COVID pandemic upended education was with regards to college admissions.

Widespread lockdowns meant that in-person tests like the SAT and ACT

were no longer offered, and that led dozens of high-end universities to drop those requirements.

Many thought this was a good thing, leveling the playing field for

disadvantaged applicants, but recently there's been a trend to reverse that, which students are

being hurt by this decision and which ones are getting a leg up.

I'm now joined by John Friedman, Professor of Economics at Brown University, and co-director of

Opportunity Insights at Harvard University, who has studied the impact of standardized testing on social

capital and economic mobility.

John, thanks for joining me today on the excerpt.

Thanks so much for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here. So John, earlier this year, Brown joined Yale and Dartmouth and announcing it will again require the SAT for admissions.

How did they justify the change?

I think it's really about looking at the data to understand what role the test scores are playing in admissions and then how that affects not only the overall pool of admitted students, but also how it might

differentially affect different students from different types of backgrounds. So first of

all, the test score just turns out to be a good predictor of academic preparation.

Students that have higher test scores are more likely to be academically successful in college.

They're less likely to have academic struggles. and they're also more likely to be successful

by various measures after they leave college. Now all of that I think would be not super

...