Prologue: I once worked with someone who held an MBA from Kellogg at Northwestern University. He could not calculate percentage change.
This was a smart person. He had gone to an august undergraduate institution (I no longer use the word “elite”), worked in business for a while, took the GRE, nailed it, and graduated with that MBA in marketing, a discipline that requires some considerable level of higher order math skills. I’m sure if he had been reviewing for a freshman (in high school, not college) course, he’d have been able to remember how you calculate percentage change via a memorized formula, but he was completely unable to parse the phrase “percentage change” and figure out how to do it.
This is no joke. It actually happened.
All this got me thinking about the news lately, and I’m sure lots of people are going to hate this post, even before they get past the headline. So be it. And, fair warning: This takes a long time to wind up where I want it to head. There are some detours and re-directions that make it best to read when you have some time.
You have probably heard that almost 1,000 faculty in the University of California system are recommending that the UCs return to requiring the SAT for admission. That’s not surprising: Berkeley, among others, adopted the SAT as a requirement because it wanted to be seen as an equal to the prestigious east-coast institutions in the 1950s who required it, and of course, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, especially in higher education. (It should be noted that ETS opened an office in Berkeleyto encourage this lunacy.) The recommendation follows other august (I refuse to use the “e” word) institutions who have returned to requiring the SAT for admission, after the COVID pandemic made the test optional almost everywhere. It’s not entirely surprising.