Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Major Changes in SAT Announced by College Board

To repeat: college is the new high school. It's a certification process resulting from huge changes in our society in recent decades, most notably the loss of skilled and semi-skilled jobs that paid good wages. Young people are told in no uncertain terms that they need to go to college if they want to get decent jobs. Making matters worse, these days, "college" includes training that used to be available for free in high schools (e.g voc-ed) or at very low cost through local organizations (e.g paramedic certification; around here, you have to go to a community college now for that, and it's expensive. It used to be a Red Cross-run thing). Plus a lot of jobs requiring a BA these days didn't used to.

This means that a lot of kids MUST go to college. As a group, college freshmen today probably aren't as smart or well-prepared as college freshmen were in 1964. But kids in 1964 could mostly go get jobs on the strength of what they'd learned in high school. That's changed. Kids today don't have the luxury of debating ideas like the relative height of the bar or whether or not SAT words are too arcane. They need to get jobs and they need to pay bills, soon. The SAT blocks some of them because they score too low for admittance to some programs or their scores say that they aren't "college ready." This means that from many perspectives, they're being denied the ability to earn a living wage.

Yes, I know that this entire situation is insane. But it exists. IMO, this problem has very little to do with actual education as classically defined. For most students, college is about certification now. Even at elite schools (the certification is just different).