Are You Smart Enough? How Colleges’ Obsession with Smartness Shortchanges Students by Alexander W. Astin (review)

If there was ever a perfectly titled book, Are You Smart Enough? How Colleges’ Obsession with Smartness Shortchanges Students is it. The second part of the title captures the essence of Astin’s argument with particular accuracy and concision. Colleges’ obsession with smartness indeed shortchanges students, Astin argues, by functioning as a sorting machine rather than performing true educational transformation.

How does this sorting occur? Astin posits the overreliance on SAT scores as the main sorting vehicle. Despite compelling research documenting the ways in which the SAT privileges wealthy students, the vast majority of institutions of higher education still use it as the primary criterion in deciding which students to admit. One reason for the SAT’s continued popularity is its role in determining an institution’s place on the US News and World Reports rankings. To characterize these rankings as popular would be an understatement; colleges and universities spend considerable human and financial resources attempting to improve their position.

Why do so many colleges and universities invest so much time and energy on rankings? Losses in public funding have contributed to higher education functioning more like a marketplace competing for students, prestige, and the financial rewards that accompany high rankings. Consequently, there is increased pressure to invest in students who can raise an institution’s profile by their mere presence.

This phenomenon can be observed in universities’ competition for National Merit Scholars, whom Astin highlights as assets used to improve rankings. He writes of universities “purchasing” National Merit Scholars, an apt term given the full tuition and room/board benefits these students typically receive (p.17).

This practice of heaping benefits on well-prepared students offers a powerful example of how higher education exacerbates rather than mitigates inequality. As long as we keep conflating privilege and merit, we fail to gain traction in ameliorating higher education’s class problem. We wrongly position test-based definitions of merit as fair, as illustrated in Dalton and Crosby’s (2015) assertion: “American colleges and universities claim to promote the public good, to produce citizens, and to foster democratic values. They almost universally claim to be meritocracies, where students achieve success through hard work and competition” (p. 3). Dalton and Crosby (2015) unpack this notion later in the article, but their words here provide an example of how fair and neutral the idea of meritocracy looks on the surface.

In a work similar to Astin’s, Guinier (2015) interrogates the uncritical acceptance of meritocracy, identifying it as the lynchpin in higher education’s stalled progress in achieving its promise as the great equalizer. By adhering to a rigid understanding of merit, Guinier (2015) argues, higher education leaders replicate rather than interrupt the societal structures that privilege some students while marginalizing others. Universities become places where students learn to play the game rather than questioning the game itself.

Guinier (2015) complicates the notion of merit, defining the current mainstream understanding of the term as testocracy. She describes testocracy as “a twenty-first century cult of standardized, quantifiable merit, that values perfect scores, but ignores character” (p. ix). In terms of the first point, she demonstrates how focusing on test scores means reifying race and class hierarchies. She begins her case by presenting compelling data showing a very strong relationship between family wealth and SAT score. Digging deeper, she invokes the well-established argument that the SAT is normed to white and middle class students, who are also more likely to have families able to pay for expensive test preparation.

For these reasons, as well as the inequities in the K-12 school system that correlate with differential scores, Guinier’s (2015) point that overemphasizing SAT scores in defining merit hurts disenfranchised students is a strong one. Guinier and Astin’s arguments are particularly important in this current moment of concern that higher education has become an elitist enterprise. Once touted for its...