<p>The College Board ultimately makes pretty weak claims about the SAT, mainly that when used in combination with HS GPA it is a slightly better predictor of college GPA than HS GPA alone, i.e., it adds incremental value to HS GPA as a predictor of college success, as defined by GPA. (I’m not sure they even make any claims about correlation with college completion rates). </p>
<p>But there’s also recent College Board-sponsored research that says the SAT’s predictive accuracy is highest for white males in STEM fields. It’s generally a weaker predictor in non-STEM fields (with some exceptions), for female students (SAT tends to substantially underpredict female college GPA, while slightly overpredicting male college GPA), and for non-white students (it generally underpredicts Asian students’ college GPAs while overpredicting black and Hispanic students’ college GPAs), though some majors produce confounding results, e.g., the SAT is a much weaker predictor of male than of female performance in communication/journalism majors.</p>
<p>The SAT’s predictive accuracy also seems to vary with the level of educational attainment of the student’s parents, though those results seem to be all over the map, variously overpredicting and underpredicting college GPAs in different combinations of majors and educational attainment levels.</p>
<p>I guess if you overpredict half the time and underpredict half the time, on average you’ll be getting it about right; but your predictions for any individual student could be pretty far off-base, depending on the student’s gender, race, choice of major, and level of parental educational attainment.</p>
<p>Given all these limitations, Beliavsky’s seemingly absolute faith in the test as <em>the</em> indicator of an individual student’s academic potential seems misplaced.</p>
<p>back to the original topic–IMO you should never pay to go to grad school (unless it is a professional school like med school, law school). Don’t go to grad school unless you can get a teaching or research assistantship or you have an employer paying for your tuition–that’s what I tell my kids. (BTW, I have a “useless” masters–I used it to get a job as an administrative assistant. I didn’t pay a cent for the degree, though.)</p>
<p>Beliavsky, one of my kids fits that test score profile. He’s a good student, and has done well incollege and that is what he wanted and wants to do as the next step.</p>
<p>"All I can say is I am very thankful D1 is in a fully funded Ph.D program. She will graduate with zero debt for all of her post high school education, and she is well aware how very very fortunate she is. "</p>
<p>I had a ChemE prof lament that people are hard to find. The grants pay the student around 30k in salary, tuition paid, insurance covered and the costs average 50k per annum. PhD graduates are earning over 100k. The problem is that undergraduates are starting over 70k and so they don’t want to take on PhDs.</p>
<p>University of California studies indicate that the SAT math sections have essentially zero predictive value on college GPAs, although that is likely because of self-selection of students into high math versus low math majors. (It would not be surprising if there is predictive value in some majors if one controlled by major.)</p>
<p>A University of Oregon study did find that an SAT math score of 600 was about the minimum for a student to succeed in a math or physics major, but there was no such minimum score (in any SAT section) for any other major. That makes sense – a student who struggles with the simple SAT math is unlikely to do well in more advanced math, but the SAT math or other sections do not necessarily indicate a maximum level of achievement in other subjects (although they speculate that their result for math and physics applies to engineering, which University of Oregon does not have).</p>
<p>“Given all these limitations, Beliavsky’s seemingly absolute faith in the test as <em>the</em> indicator of an individual student’s academic potential seems misplaced.”</p>
<p>We all know people who may not be “book smart” but who have great interpersonal skills and are go-getters, and do just fine. It’s too bad that Bel wouldn’t be able to recognize that quality in his own kid. So one dimensional.</p>
<p>I’m not even talking about people who are “not book smart.” The recent SAT study I referred to found that women on average do substantially better in college than their SAT scores would predict, while males do slightly worse than predicted. The study’s authors speculate that this is because college women tend to have better study habits and are more disciplined and focused in their studies than their male counterparts. This includes a lot of women who definitely are “book smart,” but it isn’t reflected in their SAT scores, as well as a lot of males whom we might expect to be “book smart” from their SAT scores but who in fact don’t have the discipline to acquire what might be gained from their books.</p>
<p>Generally speaking, men do a little better than women on the SAT, but women do better in college. If we were just looking for the best students and didn’t care about things like gender balance, we would want to discount male SAT scores, or, what amounts to the same thing, give women applicants an affirmative action bump up in recognition of the fact that for women as a group, a given level of SAT scores is correlated with a higher level of ultimate academic success than for men with similar scores. But in fact, many schools (especially LACs, but some research universities as well) do just the opposite, effectively giving male applicants an affirmative action thumb on the scale in the interest of gender balance. (The opposite is true at engineering schools, however).</p>
<p>In D’s field those funded Ph.D positions are extremely competitive; she felt very lucky to be offered the position straight out of undergrad. Salaries for a B.S. degree in her field are very low; in fact, I saw her major on one of those lists which says “don’t major in this because you won’t make any money.” If you want to make a better living, you’ve got to have the advanced degree, so she felt very lucky to have 4 good options from which to choose.</p>
<p>This may be related to the low predictive value of the math scores (which men do better on) for students in non/low math majors (which are what most students major in, though even fewer women choose high math majors than men).</p>
<p>Note that Bclintonk said, “slightly better predictor of college GPA.” That’s my understanding: not open-ended “success,” just GPA. And, some of us do not feel higher/highest college GPA is the one definer of college success.</p>
<p>I wonder what Bel would think of my relative who has an advanced degree from an Ivy, who had wonderful GPAs there and in undergrad, but who’s struggled with career searches?</p>
<p>AP tests* > HS grades > SAT subject tests > SAT reasoning test<<<<</p>
<p>Biased and poorly controlled research might intimate there is such ranking. Equally biased studies that rely on carefully culled previous results might yield different results, usually in the form of combinations of criteria. </p>
<p>The AP tests are particularly poor subjects to evaluate as the range and scope of the tests is as wide as they their shallowness. </p>
<p>High school grades by themselves offer worthless comparisons given the lack of standardization in grading scales and curriculum difficulties. Care to compare South Carolina’s GPA to another state? </p>
<p>And, in the end, the relative success of students depends on plenty of other factors that make those predictive studies nothing more than exercises in futility, except for the organizations that supported the studies for not so veiled reasons.</p>
<p>I am borrowing about $40,000 to get my master’s degree, but I had less than $20,000 of undergraduate debt so my total debt load is still reasonable. I would not have enrolled in the program if I hadn’t been offered a place in a federal student-to-career program that tracks into employment. Conversely, I could not have accepted the SCEP slot were I not enrolled as a graduate student.</p>
<p>Like anything else in higher education, it doesn’t make sense to simply rush off half-cocked into a graduate program just because you can’t figure anything else out. Neither does it make sense to look at all masters’ programs as educationally-superfluous cash cows.</p>
<p>Back on topic–both my D’s are pursuing graduate degrees, on their own dime. We took care of each of their undergraduate costs other than their Staffords. I am applauding them for their graduate pursuits, but as always there’s a story behind each of them. </p>
<p>D1 is a 3rd year med school student, and will accumulate loans well into the six figures. Although she probably will be well into her thirties before that loan’s paid off, I am not that concerned unless A) she decides to quit, but not much chance of that, she loves what she does, or B) the health-care rubric gets blown up, not compensating doctors enough to pay off these loans. Don’t laugh–it’s possible.</p>
<p>D2 is also in a health-related field, an undergraduate senior currently awaiting a match to a internship/masters program. Although she is paying for this, I advised her to consider cost as the #1 factor, to only consider programs–mainly in-state–that allow teaching assistantships and stipends that would basically fund her education. One highly-ranked clinical program in our city is housed in a beautiful new state-of-the-art hospital, but it has no assistantships & a two-year cost of $60K. I told D2 that the difference in paying off $25K in loans vs. $85K is huge, especially given the fact that her field’s salary, even with a masters, tops out in the high five figures. Not enough to justify that extra cost.</p>
<p>“D1 is a 3rd year med school student, and will accumulate loans well into the six figures. Although she probably will be well into her thirties before that loan’s paid off”</p>
<p>It may be possible to pay off 6 figure loans in medicine while in thirties (this is misleading since they start practicing just before or after reaching 30). Very hard in many professions to do it that quickly.</p>
<p>What’s misleading about it? After let’s say 4 years of residency, during which time she won’t be able to knock down those loans, THEN she’ll start paying them down, at the ripe old age of 31. If she zeroes them out before she hits 40, I consider that a success. It’s a huge nut.</p>
<p>Agreed, I would not recommend taking out graduate loans in that sizable amount for almost ANY other field.</p>