The Test You Can’t Buy

Start with what a selective institution is doing when it admits. It doesn’t choose between sorting people and not sorting them. It sorts either way. It’s choosing an instrument, and every instrument measures something. The only question worth asking is what.

The instruments that feel humane, the ones that look at the whole person and the full context and the story behind the application, are the ones that most reliably measure the environment a candidate was raised in, which tends to have temporary effects. The instrument that feels cold, however, measures the candidate’s true potential.

Children from families in the top 1 percent are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as middle-class students with comparable SAT or ACT scores. Two thirds of that gap is not application behavior or self-selection. It’s the admissions decision itself, made between candidates whose measured academic credentials are the same.

Three things drive it: preferences for the children of alumni, weight placed on non-academic credentials, and athletic recruitment.

The second finding is the one that matters here. Comparing students who ended up at institutions of equal quality, those same three factors are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with what happens to them afterwards. Academic credentials, SAT and ACT scores among them, are highly predictive of it. The parts of the application that carry the wealth advantage are the parts that carry no information about the candidate.

That’s a measurement of what holistic admissions did, at the most selective institutions in the world, over decades of files. It isn’t a claim about what it might do in theory.

The mechanism isn’t a scandal, it’s a design feature. The essay, the recommendation, the portfolio of extracurriculars, the sport: these are the surfaces on which money operates. A rich family can buy a coach, a consultant, a summer program, a sport that requires a boat. An instrument that rewards a rich context will reward the people with the richest context, and it will do so while feeling generous, because looking at context is what generosity looks like.

It’s also, empirically, close to a cognitive test. Meredith Frey and Douglas Detterman correlated SAT scores with a measure of general cognitive ability drawn from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery in a national sample, and found a correlation of .82. Against Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, a figural reasoning test with no words in it, the correlation was .72 once corrected for the narrow range of ability among test takers.

The SAT descends from a group intelligence test and it still behaves like one. That isn’t criticism, it’s the reason the SAT works at all and the reason the score is the most portable and least purchasable line in the application.

The interesting question is what happens in the gap. The SAT is a curriculum test as well as a reasoning test. It’s tied to one country's school content, charged at a registration fee, taken in a scheduled sitting, with sections built out of vocabulary and taught mathematics. Every one of those departures from a pure, affordable reasoning test is a place where advantage gets in.

Coaching is the obvious one. Claudia Buchmann, Dennis Condron and Vincent Roscigno measured what test preparation buys: roughly 30 points from a commercial course, roughly 37 from private tutoring, after controls. More telling than the size is the distribution: Around 70 percent of the most privileged seniors use some form of test preparation, while fewer than half of low-income students use any.

The rest of the departures are quieter. A test built on one country's syllabus is a test of how much of that country's schooling someone has had. A transcript is narrower still, because it records a particular school, a particular curriculum and a particular set of parents, and it’s close to unreadable outside the country that produced it. The seventeen-year-old with an unfamiliar national qualification isn’t evaluated as a weaker candidate. They’re evaluated as an unreadable one.

So the summary is this: The SAT's reasoning content is the part that travels, resists coaching and predicts outcomes. Its curriculum content is the part that can be bought, requires a particular schooling, and stops at the border. The instrument would be fairer if it were more like an intelligence test, not less.

That’s the argument for testing cognitive ability directly. We’re not replacing a respectable instrument with something exotic, we’re keeping the part of it that works and dropping the part that makes it less fair.

The first is figural. It’s built from abstract patterns, and answering it requires no reading, no vocabulary and no arithmetic. Raven's Progressive Matrices, the archetype of this format, has been in cross-cultural use since 1936 for that reason.

The second is verbal reasoning, and the distinction that matters is what kind. A vocabulary test asks whether someone has met a rare word before, which is a question about the school they attended and the books that were in the house. A verbal reasoning test asks whether they can hold a relation in mind, follow an inference, and find the point where an argument breaks. It uses ordinary words to do it. The first measures acquisition. The second measures operation, and the second is the one worth having.

Neither half tests a syllabus. There’s no history on it, no literature, no taught mathematics, nothing that rewards having sat in a particular classroom in a particular country. Nothing on it requires the schooling of any particular country, so it can be sat by someone whose national qualification no admissions officer in Austin has ever seen. It costs us almost nothing to administer, which means it can cost the candidate nothing to take, which means the filter runs before money enters the process rather than after.

That’s the population the incumbents structurally can’t see. Not the underrated applicant at a good school, but the one who was never on anybody's list, in a country nobody was recruiting from, holding a transcript nobody can read. For that person a two-hour test they can sit from anywhere is the only door in the building.

The verbal half also runs in English, because FrontierU runs in English. To make sure out members can get the most out of the community, we require English fluency. A member who can’t follow an argument or collaborate on projects in English can’t use what we offer. That’s a requirement doing real work, which is the standard this piece applies to everyone else. It’s still a requirement, and in much of the world English fluency tracks the kind of schooling a family pays for. It’s a real limit on how wide the door opens. However, languages are easy to learn today at a low price. There are many resources available ranging from apps to books and free online courses. If someone is rejected from FrontierU because their English is lacking, they can reapply when they’ve improved.

IQ itself is also routinely oversold, and the correction is worth citing rather than the hype. In 2022 Paul Sackett and colleagues showed that decades of validity estimates had been systematically overcorrected for range restriction. The familiar figure of around .5 for cognitive ability predicting job performance came down to roughly .3. That’s the number to work from. It describes a real relationship and a modest one. It isn’t destiny, it doesn’t describe a person, and an institution built on the premise that one number tells you who someone is would be a bad institution. But the SAT correlates .82 with IQ. An argument that IQ is empty is also an argument that the SAT is empty, and with it the LSAT, the GRE, and most of a century of selective admissions. That’s a larger claim than it’s usually meant to be. Everyone in this market is already sorting on cognitive ability. The difference is whether it’s done openly, and with the version that can’t be tutored.

And our admissions process solves this problem. Besides cognitive ability, we also look at proof of agency, creativity and other drivers of someone’s potential. We do this in much more detail and with much more accuracy than a university’s holistic admissions process does.

MIT reinstated its testing requirement in 2022. Dartmouth followed in February 2024, and did something unusual first: it asked four of its own economists to study the question and published what they found.

Two findings matter here. Grade inflation had degraded the high school transcript to near-uselessness: students arriving with a perfect 4.0 earned college grades just 0.1 points higher than students who arrived with a 3.2. And under the optional policy, lower-income applicants were withholding scores that would have helped them, because they judged their scores against a published average rather than against the applicants they were competing with. Scores below Dartmouth's average would have confirmed those candidates were qualified. Withheld, they left an admissions officer with nothing but the context of the school they came from.

That’s the general result. Removing a measurement doesn’t remove the sorting. It moves the sorting onto the instruments that remain, and those are the ones wealth already controls. Take away the number and admissions doesn’t become kinder. It becomes less legible and easier to buy your way into.

The Court struck down both, in the same sentence, for the same reason. Neither the diploma nor the test, Chief Justice Burger wrote, was shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs. The ruling wasn’t anti-testing. It was against unvalidated screening of any kind, and it was right. The touchstone, the Court said, is business necessity. A screen that keeps people out has to be doing real work.

Employers heard half of the ruling. Direct cognitive testing became legally hazardous and expensive to defend, so it receded. The credential requirement, condemned by the same Court in the same breath, did the opposite. It spread until it became the default gate on American economic life. Joseph Fuller and Manjari Raman at Harvard Business School analyzed 26 million job postings and found, among many similar examples, that 67 percent of postings for production supervisors demanded a college degree while only 16 percent of the people already doing that job had one. They put more than six million middle-skill jobs at risk from the same pattern.

That’s an unvalidated screen with a documented disparate impact, which is the thing Griggs prohibited. It survived because norms are rarely litigated.

So a two-hour test was replaced by a four-year, six-figure credential, and this was understood as progress. Whatever else it is, it isn’t inclusion. It’s the most expensive filter ever built, sitting in front of the most consequential door in the economy, and its cost falls hardest on the people the original ruling was meant to protect.

Above the floor, we look for many things. This includes proof of agency and obsession: evidence that a candidate starts things, finishes things, and has gone unreasonably deep on something without being asked. No legacy preference, no allocation, no recruited athletes. Every seat awarded on a basis other than ability and drive is noise pushed into a signal that employers are paying to read.

Then the part worth pressing us on, because a cognitive filter is only the more inclusive instrument if what sits behind it is reachable. Membership online is priced at a small fraction of what tuition costs, and the campuses are priced as membership rather than tuition, with no four-year lock-in. We’re establishing a scholarship fund for members who clear the bar and can’t pay, and members with scholarships will be charged at cost instead of the full price.

Selection and funding are separate problems and should be solved separately. The established institutions do both badly, lowering the standard to look accessible while the greatest barrier, the price, goes untouched. Widening access means finding potential and funding it. It doesn’t mean lowering the bar and calling the result inclusion.

We do things differently such that wealth does not advantage our applicants. We look for those with exceptional talent and drive, wherever they come from and whatever their budget. All the rest is noise. At FrontierU, they can catch up with their advantaged peers in a short time.

This is what meritocracy and inclusion looks like.