In 1947, the College Board opened an office in Berkeley, California. Previously, from the turn of the century onward, the organization had been administering entrance examinations for schools in the Northeast, and in 1926 it created and began using the original Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT. The Board’s western expansion after World War II was a sign, according to the writer Nicholas Lemann, of its “national aspirations and of the University of California’s high status in public higher education.” But it would take another two decades for the University of California to begin requiring its applicants to take the SAT—and therein hangs a tale about the changes in American education in which testing and the College Board itself have played a decisive and highly problematic role.
It is a tale about how the testing regime of the College Board began to dominate the higher-education admissions system on its way to becoming a behemoth that now grosses $1 billion annually. More important, it is a tale about how universities in the United States changed the way they interact with the primary and secondary educational institutions that feed into them—a change that had, and continues to have, parlous consequences for America’s youth.
After World War II, President Truman formed a commission to “chart the future of higher education,” Lemann explains in his new book, Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing. In 1947, the commission issued a report that “recommended the democratization of access to college. It called for a massive financial aid program at the undergraduate and graduate levels, free tuition for those attending two-year schools, and a program of continuing education.” It also called for the end of segregation in the South and quotas that were employed against Jews.
But while the commission’s purpose was to open higher education to all, there was a competing idea, says Lemann—one that “came to value and champion a select number of private and public institutions that would nurture a kind of talented elite.” How to both manage a large influx of students from across the country with different educational backgrounds and also funnel them into a small number of slots was a question that might be solved by standardized testing.
The SAT began as an IQ test, a way for higher education to locate students with “aptitude” at educational institutions not necessarily known for producing college-level talent. It was modeled on an IQ test that was given to U.S. Army inductees for World War I. But as such tests became more associated with racial sorting and eugenics, the test eventually changed too—even altering its name from the Scholastic Aptitude Test to the Scholastic Achievement Test.