It is, as the saying goes, difficult to make predictions; especially about the future. That may have always been the case but the issue was especially acute in the spring and summer of 2020.
The covid pandemic and the associated lock-down and stay-at-home orders designed to constrain the growth of the virus forced widespread changes in working practices, business organization, educational techniques and social interactions. Even after the roll-out of vaccines and the relaxation of often stringent social distancing regulations, a debate raged about how lasting some of the impacts would prove to be.
Perhaps the most striking example was the rise of working from home. The pandemic forced a wide-spread adoption of working from home in previously officer-based roles and, especially in the early days of the pandemic, the comment pages of the media filled up with prophesying on its future. Many workers seemed to, understandably, enjoy the benefits in terms of saved time and expense on commuting and the extra flexibility for managing family life, whilst – initially at least – bosses generally seemed surprised at how well the rapidly adopted procedures seemed to work. Some argued that working from home, in many roles at least, was here to stay – never again would workers be expected to drag themselves into an office five days a week. Analysts wrote downbeat reports on the future of commercial real estate and the plethora of businesses – such as takeaway lunch venues – which had grown up to support office-based workers. A few went even further, proclaiming the end of geography and seeing a future in which many workers – untethered from the need to commute – would be able to work from wherever they choose.
Four years later the boldest predictions have not come to pass. There has been a notable rise in home working but so-called ‘hybrid working’ rather than entirely remote has been the norm and geography, in most cases, still matters.
In education, especially in the United States, a similar picture can be drawn when it comes to the use of standardized testing in college admissions. Such testing has a long history. Some US colleges introduced their own entrance exams in the late nineteenth century and, after 1901, the College Board exam began to provide a common benchmark. During the 1920s standardized tests began to shift away from measuring knowledge and towards attempts to assess latent potential and ability to learn. After the Second World War, the use of SATs to gauge the potential of returning soldiers looking to utilize the GI Bill to gain some college education became widespread. And from the 1950s the ACT test began to attract large numbers of takers.
Many of the changes wrought by the pandemic represented an acceleration of an existing trend rather than something entirely new. The rise in internet shopping and the challenge to traditional bricks and mortar retailers, for example, did not emerge suddenly in the Spring of 2020. In the years immediately before 2020, the use of standardized tests in college admission was being called into question.
After a long, multi-decade rise the numbers taking standardized tests plateaued in the late 2010s and more than 1,000 colleges had already made tests optional. But 2020 led to much more sweeping changes. In many cases high school students found themselves simply unable to take the test due to sudden pandemic-related restrictions.
As a direct result, the number of ‘test optional’ colleges rose from around 1,000 in March 2020 to 1,700 by the fall of that year. As with so many pandemic-related accelerations and changes, the sudden apparent demise of standardized testing prompted many to ponder whether such testing would ever come back.
Four years on, it has. Last week Harvard became the latest school to once again require standardized test results for the class entering in 2025. In their announcement of the changes, Harvard pointed to research by Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman which found that standardized tests are an important tool to identify promising students and less well resourced high schools and to improve access to education for less well off students and to increase socio-economic diversity. Whilst acknowledging that such tests do show some bias towards the children of higher-income families, which can afford more in the way of test preparation, the authors found that other potential ways of assessing applications – such as essays, recommendation letters or extracurricular activities – tended to display higher levels of such bias.
This week the US Expert panel weighed in with their own view. The results were decisive. Asked whether “requiring standardized test scores for admissions will create measurably enhanced opportunities for potentially high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds”, 90% of respondents(weighted by confidence) either strongly agreed or agreed. That is just about as clear as any poll result can be.
The pandemic brought in widespread changes in how much of society was organized. Four years later it is increasingly clear that many of those changes were temporary.
