Elsewhere on this blog I mention Sandel’s discussion of the controversy over diversity in college admissions. He thinks a resolution is reached by considering the telos of the university: what is it for, what is its purpose? (Michael Sandel, in his iTunes U course on Justice, lesson 9). Recently, and especially during the COVID pandemic, university admissions are no longer requiring standardized test scores to be submitted by applicants. Of course, colleges need to increase enrollment and this would help them financially, but it is usually characterized as broadening the student populations. Making it more diverse. Maybe so.

Recently, Razib Khan’s blog raises some concerns (https://razib.substack.com/p/applying-iq-to-iq). Khan shows the relationship between high IQ and other tests scores and academic and even general success such as book writing and patent development. He suggests that by selecting less academically gifted students, the universities could return to selecting more of the elite, the wealthy, and the well connected. The best education has usually, or formerly, been reserved for the elite and the well-born aristocracy. In Europe, the universities were created to prepare aristocrats for a life of, well, aristocracy. But it has been said, that in America, and elsewhere in the movement towards democracy, the purpose of higher education was to prepare for a well functioning democracy. Khan notes “But the age of aristocracy ended in Europe, and a new egalitarian ethos required ways to identify those with talent but no connections or pedigree. Intelligence testing appeared in modern Europe as a way in which to identify talented individuals born outside of the elite.” Khan describes the ancient practice of testing in China as a selection tool for higher office and higher education. But there was a time when testing was not done as we now see happening in American college selections. “When examinations fell out of favor, as occurred during the Eastern Han, the Tang, and the Yuan, the consequences were inevitable. A coterie of great families, or ruling castes, came to dominate the administration, and unattached youth of talent were excluded and marginalized. The testing regime was uniformly disliked by the aristocrats because they already had power, connections, and polish. They perceived in themselves the right to rule. They required no test to validate their self-worth.”

It would seem to me that in America, which strives to be inclusive and diverse. At least in our values, we want everyone to have equal opportunity for a full and prosperous life and that democracy must be equalitarian if it is truly rule by the demos. So whether testing is required or not, the purpose of our universities is to serve us all and they must be some selection method that is not blind to academic qualifications but does not see that alone as the most important entry criterion. And higher education should neither be blind to race or ethnicity nor regional difference or social and economic status but should embrace a multiplicity of backgrounds in student selection.

In Michael Sandel’s book What Money Can’t Buy, he decries the selling of higher education in terms of financial gain. Universities have always had as part of their purpose to train students for a career. But to value education primarily on the basis of the size of future income is self-defeating. Sandel thinks that if the standards of higher education are no higher than common greed, then universities are no longer serving a higher purpose. A liberal arts education should change a student’s life in a more substantial way than making money.

Recent changes in college life were depicted and satirized in the recent streaming television series The Chair. There has been a trend toward dropping humanistic education and the classics often because these represent white colonial culture. In The Chair, the college administration buckles under student demands for their view of correct behavior. A new book by a man of color pushes back on the regrettable trend of dropping the classics from the curriculum. Roosevelt Montas, a Dominican immigrant, was the director of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, a classics based studies required of all students. His book Rescuing Socrates, reviewed this week by the WSJ, tells of how his own undergraduate years studying in the Core Curriculum gave him a transformational sense of his own self.