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Why the SAT Isn’t a ‘Student Affluence Test’
A lot of the apparent income effect on standardized tests
is owed to parental IQ
—
a fact that needs addressing.
ENLARGE
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
By
Charles Murray
March 24, 2015 7:11 p.m. ET
Spring is here, which
means it’s time for elite colleges to send out acceptance letters. Some will
go to athletes, the children of influential alumni and those who round out the school’s diversity
profile. But most will go to the offspring of the upper middle class. We all kno
w why, right?
Affluent parents get their kids into the best colleges by sending them to private schools or
spending lots of money on test preparation courses. Either way, it perpetuates privilege from
generation to generation.
The College Board provides am
munition for this accusation every year when it shows average
SAT scores by family income. The results are always the same: The richer the parents, the higher
the children’s SAT scores. This has led some to view the SAT as merely another weapon in the
ineq
uality wars, and to suggest that SAT should actually stand for “Student Affluence Test.”
It’s a bum rap. All high
-
quality academic tests look as if they’re affluence tests. It’s inevitable.
Parental IQ is correlated with children’s IQ everywhere. In all ad
vanced societies, income is
correlated with IQ. Scores on academic achievement tests are always correlated with the test
-
takers’ IQ. Those three correlations guarantee that every standardized academic
-
achievement test
shows higher average test scores as pa
rental income increases.
But those correlations also mean that a lot of the apparent income effect is actually owed to
parental IQ. The SAT doesn’t have IQ information on the parents. But the widely used National
Longitudinal Survey of Youth contains thou
sands of cases with data on family income, the
mother’s IQ, and her children’s performance on the math and reading tests of the Peabody
Individual Achievement Test battery, which test the same skills as the math and reading tests of
the SAT.
For the SAT, s
hifting to more than $200,000 of family income from less than $20,000 moved the
average score on the combined math and reading tests to the 74th percentile from the 31st
—
a
jump of 43 percentiles. The same income shift moved the average PIAT score to the 82
nd
percentile from the 30th
—
a jump of 52 percentiles.
Now let’s look at the income effect in the PIAT when the mother’s IQ is statistically held
constant at the national average of 100. Going to a $200,000 family income from a $1,000 family
income raises t
he score only to the 76th percentile from the 50th
—
an increase of 26 percentiles.
More important, almost all of the effect occurs for people making less than $125,000. Going to
$200,000 from $125,000 moves the PIAT score only to the 76th percentile from th
e 73rd
—
a
trivial change. Beyond $200,000, PIAT scores go down as income increases.
In assessing the meaning of this, it is important to be realistic about the financial position of
families making $125,000 who are also raising children. They were in the to
p quartile of income
distribution in 2013, but they probably live in an unremarkable home in a middle
-
class
neighborhood and send their children to public schools. And yet, given mothers with equal IQs,
the child whose parents make $125,000 has only a triv
ial disadvantage, if any, when competing
with children from families who are far more wealthy.
Why should almost all of the income effect be concentrated in the first hundred thousand dollars
or so? The money itself may help, but another plausible explanat
ion is that the parents making,
say, $60,000 are likely to be regularly employed, with all the things that regular employment
says about a family. The parents are likely to be conveying advantages other than IQ such as
self
-
discipline, determination and re
silience
—
“grit,” as this cluster of hard
-
to
-
measure qualities
is starting to be called in the technical literature.
Families with an income of, say, $15,000 are much more likely to be irregularly employed or
subsisting on welfare, with negative implicatio
ns for that same bundle of attributes. Somewhere
near $100,000 the marginal increments in grit associated with greater income taper off, and
further increases in income make little difference.
Let’s throw parental education into the analysis so that we ca
n examine the classic indictment of
the SAT: the advantage a child of a well
-
educated and wealthy family (Sebastian, I will call him)
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