‘Admission tests don’t fuel inequity’
The College Board is a non-profit organization set up to recruit candidates for American universities. It is a member of the India Global Higher Education Alliance, a consortium of innovative universities in India and established universities outside the country. The alliance is a platform for Indian university leaders to collaborate with and learn from their international peers. India Global Alliance Forum
The India Global Alliance Forum took place recently and Jeremy Singer, President, The College Board and Linda, Vice President, International, The College Board spoked to HT on the sidelines of the event. Edited excerpts:
What does the College Board do? Singer: The College Board was founded over a hundred years ago. We’re a non-profit membership organization and were founded by a handful of universities in the United States, primarily the Ivy League. The reason for its foundation was that at that time, in the early 1900s, schools were looking for students to come to their universities but were finding candidates only in the northeast part of the United States. It was hard to find students from across the US. And so they realized that their goal was to create an examination that would help them identify talented individuals, not just in the northeast, but in the west and the south and the Midwest. And for the last hundred plus years, we’ve continued in that vein to try to expand equity and access and help universities in the United States, find qualified candidates. We do a lot of work not just in the US but also do it globally. We’ve been in India for more than five decades now with most of if focusing on higher education institutions finding great students in India who would succeed at their universities.a few years ago, Linda , who runs our international programs came to me with an idea around expanding equity and access with a focus on India. The country has a huge population and there’s an increased focus on getting students into higher education. We wanted to see if we could partner with stakeholders here just like the way we do in the US. We wanted to give opportunities for all students, including those coming from lower income households or rural areas or those who may not have the same opportunities as the more affluent ones. And so that was the initial goal of this alliance that we’ve helped start.
Of late, there exist enough allied service providers helping students gain admissions abroad. So has the College Board’s role changed?
Linda: Our focus remains to help students from India going to the US to successfully transition into higher education. Just knowing about those universities is not enough. We offer a number of different programmes to ease that transition such as acing the SAT. The skills that are tested on the SAT are exactly those skills that higher education institutions value and believe and are required for students to be successful in higher education when they go to the US or Canada or elsewhere. The SAT really helps them do that to understand what to expect and skills that they need to build in order to be successful when they move on to university. So that’s one thing in terms of the process of applying to US universities and successfully getting there. That process can also be very confusing for for many students. So we offer a website called The Future which is a college planning website, where students can get access for free to a ton of information about the process of applying to university, get access to resources to help them plan out which universities might be the right fit for them, help them think about what are ways that they could fund higher education. All these are free services. And then on the counselor side as well as the higher education side in terms of being able to connect with students, we actually offer a service which allows universities to find students who may be a good fit for their university. Over time, we hope to be able to build similar pathways and enable students within India to have those streamlined pathways into higher education, as well and in particular, for students that come from more underprivileged backgrounds to be able to get equal opportunities to move on to excellent universities here.
How do you respond to debates that testing mechanisms like GRE are discriminatory and hinder inclusiveness in education? Singer: There not equitable opportunities for all students in the United States and that’s something that we’ve constantly worked at and ever improve. One of the opportunities is for students to demonstrate potential through through taking the SAT exam and one of the inequities we saw was lack of resources. While wealthier families were t aking t est prep, t he lower income families didn’t have that opportunity. So we did a partnership with Sal Khan and Khan Academy in the US who do these great online educational resources for free and we worked with with his organization to build official practice material that is free for students. I don’t think the exam is the cause of inequity. I think there are other systems where wealth offers certain students greater advantage and we’re trying to address those through free test prep material and fee waivers for low income students to take the SAT.