Standardized tests to get IN to college? Standardized tests INSTEAD of college.

More and more universities are waiving standardized test requirements for admission on the grunds that there are racial achievement gaps in such tests (this is like shooting the messenger—it’s far better to help fix the underlying problem that creates the gap). Obviously, this will attenuate the primary function of universities—signaling the ability to get in and complete the requirements of a college. Because of the waste, bloat, inefficiency, and intolerance of campuses, social theorists keep looking for the educational model that is going to “disrupt” higher education and send it to the ash heap of history (where it probably belongs). For Clay Christensen, it was going to be online education; for Peter Thiel, it was going to be private fellowships; for Sal Kahn, it was going to be lecture videos—none of these has worked out. The college degree (particularly elite college degree) remains the standard way to signal ability to employers and society. But what if the disruptive signal has been underneath our noses this whole time? What if it’s the standardized test itself that is a terrific way to signal one’s intellectual abilities to employers and society? Instead of waving around a degree from Yale, why not wave around a 1500 SAT score? If those SAT’s correlate really tightly with success in college (they do), and are a terrific way to signal ability to college admissions committees (they are), and college is mostly about signaling (it is), then why not skip that intermediate step of spending four years to acquire a degree as a signal, and use the standardized test itself? The shift would need to be cultural: somehow, it’s currently seen as unseemly to flaunt one’s standardized test scores, but not one’s college degree, but this is arbitrary. Employers should begin asking for those scores. Employees should begin putting those scores on their résumés. Writers should begin putting their scores in bylines the way they currently do with their college degrees. If society needs a signal of ability, let’s save ourselves four years and thousands of dollars per person, and simply have the standardized tests be the first barrage against the inefficient and largely corrupt higher education system that, as Bryan Caplan has pointed out, is primarily a remarkably expensive signaling system.