Navigating Standardized Tests From the Student Side

Higher education and student evangelist, Akil Bello, joins FYI for a candid conversation about the impact that standardized tests have on the industry and the student mindset.

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Who is Akil Bello?

Akil Bello is a nationally recognized writer, researcher and advocate for access to high quality education and opportunities for all people regardless of wealth. He currently serves as the Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement at FairTest.

In this Episode

Akil Bello, Senior Director of Advocacy at FairTest, joins FYI host Gil Rogers to talk about the labyrinth of standardized testing that faces students and institutions each year. With a wealth of experience that spans over three decades, Akil is able to know how best to advocate for students through the process. 

As the college application frenzy intensifies, Gil and Akil scrutinize the motivations propelling institutions like Cornell and Yale to bring back testing requirements and how their decisions shape the academic terrain. They also navigate through the thorny issue of college rankings and their influence on perceived university value, prompting a broader discussion on what truly defines success in higher education. 

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Episode Transcript

Navigating Standardized Tests From the Student Side with Akil Bello

Publishing Date: May 14, 2024

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome back to FYI, the For Your Institution Podcast, presented by Mongoose. I’m your host, Gil Rogers. And on today’s episode, I’m joined by the Senior Director of Advocacy and Advancement for FairTest, Akil Bello. Akil and I discuss the latest trend of institutions moving away from test optional policies, many of which that were put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We’ll talk about Akil’s experience as a test prep tutor, as well as his role at FairTest and his perspectives on why and how institutions use the information from standardized tests in college admissions and recruitment. Let’s listen in.

[00:00:44] Gil: Hey, Akil, how’s it going?

[00:00:46] Akil: Good, how are you?

[00:00:46] Gil: I’m good. Thanks for hopping on. I know you’re a super busy guy, but obviously there’s a lot going on in the world of higher ed related to a topic I know you’re very passionate about and interested in, with respect to standardized tests being introduced back into many institutions’ enrollment processes.

But before we hop into the meat of the conversation, for those who may not know you, which I’m doubtful, and many of the listeners are not aware of who you are. But for those who have not met you before, I’d love for you to, kind of, just give a brief introduction of who you are, what you do, how you got there.

[00:01:24] Akil: Sure. As if I would be universally known. That makes me laugh. But let’s see. Who am I? I have been in and around admissions and access to education, really, K-16, for almost 35 years now. Started off in test prep, did that for a bunch of years, worked at Princeton Review, ran my own test prep company, did a whole bunch of things like that, then moved more into admissions, generally, advocacy work, policy work.

I’m currently Senior Director of Advocacy at FairTest. And so, I spend my time thinking about access to education and the barriers that are put in front of it, unnecessarily.

[00:02:11] Gil: Awesome. Well, that’s a great kind of foundation to the conversation. And I’ve followed you on various social platforms for a while now, saw you on a Netflix special. That was pretty cool. Would love for you to, kind of, share, what is your why? Like, why are you at FairTest? Thinking through, obviously, got your start working for a test prep company and now working for a company that, in many ways, is saying, “Hey. Maybe we don’t need to be doing a whole lot of that or as much of that, right?” Tell us about your why.

[00:02:42] Akil: That’s an interesting question, because my why, I think, changes. This started as nepotism and poverty. It started because I was in college and I had work study, but the college had no work-study jobs. So, yeah, like, “We’ve awarded you this money you have to earn that we’re not going to help you earn, because, like, yeah.”

So, I had to get a part-time job. My aunt, fortunately, worked at a test prep company and I threw her name around and it got me a job and that suckered me, that brought me into, sucked me into the world of test prep. And it was easy money. And the more I did it, you know, it was interesting, easy money.

I also think it’s interesting, my father and mother and stepmother are all educators. So, falling into education seems not surprising, given what I grew up with. So, the why initially was a part time job to give me some money. And then as I got more and more into it, I just started doing it in different ways and being more exposed to education, higher ed, access, and therefore looking to impact those areas that I was working in, in more useful, important ways.

And so, to me, I don’t see a conflict between having been in test prep and still being a tutor and saying the test need to go. Because as a test prep tutor, I think I know really well the limitations of the test and how they’re overused and misused. And therefore, it would be selfish of me to support continuing using these tests as we’re using them, given what I know about them.

The mere fact that you can have a billion-dollar test prep industry should tell you that testing isn’t what they tell you it is. That’s all the evidence you need. You can pay somebody to increase scores substantially. Yeah, let’s probably not have that.

[00:04:36] Gil: Yeah, I think that’s a very astute observation. And I know you’ve shared across multiple conversations over the years. I look at it as, you know, as a former admissions officer, you know, one of the things that I didn’t necessarily know in my first year as an admissions counselor, it’s like, oh, when you’re reading an application, we just have to look for the… we look for the numbers, right? Because the numbers are “easy” to wrap our heads around. You know, if they’re a high number, it’s good. If it’s a low number, it’s bad. Just like, you know, a high rank of a school is good. If a low rank, it’s bad, right?

And so, as humans, we sometimes gravitate towards simplicity, but it’s a little more complicated, right? And so, as you’re checking these balances when you’re working with families, obviously, your support, a family is looking for, kind of, a leg up in the process, there’s a sad reality that making that investment can “pay off” when it comes to having a higher score for consideration. But there’s more to it than that, I feel like. And I think that I’d love for you to kind of share a little bit of your perspectives on families wise, right? Why does a family come to a test prep company and/or a test prep tutor and say, “Help my kid get a better score?”

[00:05:45] Akil: I mean, I think it’s basically what you said. I think that institution requirements guide family behavior, right? And unfortunately, institution requirements guide high school behavior, right? So, by commoditizing, that’s a word, test scores, right, like, they’ve created value around test scores, right? Like, whether it’s true or untrue, there has… well, let’s say even pre-pandemic, there was clear value around test scores. So, parents have a history of assigning value to test scores. There is something you can gain. I was told there’s a scholarship. College board is sending emails to everyone. Your test scores will help you stand out. And they’re marketing hard that there is value to these test scores. So, of course, families are going to invest what they can in achieving something that will return on their investment, right?

I think the problems come in because you can buy that value, you’re rewarding those with the time and the money and the knowledge to do it, right? And what I ask of institutions is, can you clearly demonstrate that something is lost, except disadvantage to wealthy kids, by not using them? The marginal increase of most places in prediction of who will do well in college isn’t worth the social cost and all the other costs of students’ time and energy for test prep. I don’t want any kid… I’ve turned down lots of people who want me to tutor their kids in ninth grade. Like, that just shouldn’t be what we’re doing. That shouldn’t be what institutions are requiring, right? Like, this can’t be what we want high school experience to be.

So, to me, the cost of these tests far outweighs their value. I don’t think they say nothing, but I think they say very little about knowledge preparedness and all of those sort of things.

[00:07:40] Gil: Yeah. So, I feel like I love how you put it that institutional requirements drive family and high school behaviors, because, like, there’s a certain element of, you mentioned it, pre-COVID, there was a certain level of value, COVID hit, and it was one of those situations where, well, now we’ve got this population of students that they didn’t take a test because of a whole variety of issues tied to social isolation, cancellation of tests, and that now we’re going to tie their academic performance to “normal benchmarks,” and we’re going to say, “Well, these kids aren’t keeping up as well. Clearly, it’s because we dropped the standardized test.” It’s like, well, there are also all these other things that might’ve been impacting a student performance?

[00:08:25] Akil: Yeah, and that’s fascinating to me, with all of the, with the recent announcement from the four or five schools that have driven the public narrative, right, that are saying students without tests are performing less well, I call BS. One, they haven’t accounted for COVID. And two, less well is defined as something like a 3.2 in almost all of those reports. What? Since when are we concerned about the kid with a 3.2?

[00:08:53] Gil: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s not, like, it’s a 3.2 out of 10, right?

[00:08:56] Akil: Right. It’s a 3.2 GPA. That is a solid B, maybe an A minus, right, like, whatever. Like, that’s a good GPA. But oh, no, they’re struggling. They’re not successful, which is insane.

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[00:10:02] Gil: Yeah. So, I like how you mentioned there’s four or five institutions driving the national narrative. I think, prior to when we hit record, I, kind of, brought up this point of, and we know it, we talk about it every year, there’s this… and I’ve mentioned it on this podcast multiple times. So, the listeners probably are getting annoyed by me at this point, but we have this annual admissions hype machine that is created, in many respects, to make the process… it’s to the benefit of institutions across the board because it makes students be stressed out about their chances for admission, so they apply to more schools, right? And so, then, now, you’ve got application numbers increasing for institutions.

But test prep is a part of it. Affordability is a part of it. And it’s almost like clockwork, right? When the national media is going to be talking about certain things, just by what time of year it is when it comes to the college admissions cycle. And so, right now, we have a wrinkle in it where we have these institutions that are returning to test prep. Inside Higher Ed last week, reported on Cornell returning to their testing requirements. This was following Yale and Dartmouth, and Caltech. You’ve got these four or five, like you said, institutions, kind of, driving the market.

What do you say to institutions that look at those types of decisions? And, like we were talking about before we recorded, most enrollment professionals are really student-focused people that want to help drive success and connect students to the right opportunity. But they have these outside pressures, and they have pressures from the board and the president who are looking at these decisions and saying, “We should really look at this and revisit this because you got to keep up with the Joneses,” right? And so, how do you, how do you keep up with the Joneses without copying the Joneses, right?

You have all these institutions that went test-optional during COVID for, probably, wasn’t the right reason, but it was a reason that made them do it. And now, there’s this, kind of, pressure to go back, right? How do we hold the line?

[00:11:58] Akil: Institutions have to understand their mission and their mandate and their audience. I think the highly rejective colleges, they want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to be lauded for contributing to the public good, social mobility, diversity, but every practice they have restricts that, right? So, they put out press releases, they drive a narrative that says we’re, we have smart… that minimizes the exclusionary practices that they have, right?

And I think that that’s half the problem, right, is that, when you have these places that are producing bankers and all of the most exploitive industries possible, but if you look at the New York Times, what they say is that they’re going to cure cancer, right, which was one of the things that annoyed me about the Leonhardt article, right? It’s, like, no, they want to admit people that cure cancer. No, their primary export is to consulting firms, right? So, like, they’re not producing the researchers that cure cancer. They are recruiting the people who McKinsey will put in a job. And that’s fine if that’s what you want to do, but just say so.

So, I think that they create environments that attract a particular type of person, but they try to get credit for promoting the social good and creating knowledge. That’s what annoys me, is the hypocrisy of that.

I think institutions that serve a public good… for instance, Mercy College produces business people, not the McKinsey’s of the world, but the people who are going to run your local bodega, who are going to start the mom and pop, they produce nurses, right? That, to me, is a school. That’s what a school is supposed to do. They help educate people who are going to help society, right?

So, I think that when you’re comparing those who are going to support students being in the 1%, not getting to, but being in the 1%, and those who are going to support the teachers, the doctors, the nurses, right, if you are an institution that supports helping students do better within their environment, then you have to own what are the things we need to make that happen?

And what you find is if an institution looks at what population they serve, what their objectives are, they generally don’t need to chase the highly rejectives who have a different purpose. Harvard is an investment bank. They exist as an investment bank to maintain their feeder program to investment banking. And that’s fine. Just say so. Just admit that that’s what you do. It’s okay, right? So, I think everyone needs to own their mission and not be hypocritical about who they serve and why they exist. And I think if institutions do that, the decisions around what they need in their admissions process will change.

[00:14:50] Gil: I think part of the challenge is that that’s not your brand, right? The brand is not, we’re an investment bank, right? The brand is…

[00:14:58] Akil: Right. No one wants to own brand somehow.

[00:15:01] Gil: Yeah. And so, that’s the challenge. And I think one of the things that conversations like this hopefully do is help people to understand, like, not everybody needs to be Harvard, Yale, Princeton, right? The great, great places, great people there. I know people there, right? Not everybody needs to, just like not everybody needs to be University of Hartford or University of New Haven, where I worked, right? Like, there are a million and a half schools in between when we… and I can’t say in between because I feel like that brings down the road of, like, rankings, right?

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[00:16:19] Gil: One of the issues that I continually bring up is that, with respect to, like, U.S. News ranking, specifically, I ironically have never had anyone from U.S. News and world report on this podcast, sadly. But they’re invited, if they, if we wanted to come talk about methodology, right?

The methodology of that ranking, specifically, has had tweaks over the years, but by and large, the inputs that are put into this ranking have less to do with traditional first time undergraduate education and more to do with all of the other stuff of a college. And that’s not to say that stuff isn’t important. It’s just it’s packaged incorrectly for what these rankings indicate. There are better rankings out there for identifying institutions that contribute to social mobility, have a better impact on positive student experience. But we focus on the brand, right? And the brand is, “Well, I got to drive more applications and I got to bring in students of higher caliber with their test scores because that’s going to move my ranking up a point or two, right?”

And the reality is we have these institutions that we’re not talking about the top 10 or top 20. We’re talking about the middle ground, right? The 40… going from U.S. News to 45 to 44 isn’t that big of a change, right? Or from 120 to 119, right? But we put in all this effort with PR to other institutions and put in these criteria as hurdles for students versus, kind of, focusing on access,

I’d love for you to, kind of, to share some of your thoughts around what institute… like, in this, landscape and in this market that I said to you before we started recording the conversation, I unfortunately am a little bit of a pessimist in this, where I feel like it’s going to get a little more worse before it gets better. And there are going to be institutions that, no matter how much we say it on a podcast and how much we throw it on LinkedIn, they’re going to follow the wave and they’re going to put that barrier back in place.

What do you say to institutions… again, that same vein on holding the line, but specifically in the realm of access and opportunity for students?

[00:18:24] Akil: I mean, I look at it a couple different ways, right? They’re institutions, one of the problems I have in all of this is the hypocrisy, not even hypocrisy. I guess that’s even the wrong word, right? Is that there are conflicting forces at play, colleges or businesses. So, they’re going to make business decisions, right? But the messaging to students and families isn’t that we’re a business making business decisions. It’s that we’re admitting the best and the brightest and da da da da. So, if you don’t get in that says something as a failure on the student’s part, not a business decision on the college part. So, I would love higher ed as an industry, as a sector, to do a better job of clearly communicating their goals.

With regards to access, I think, as educational institutions, it’s important to clearly communicate what they mean by access, right? Students often hear, intelligent, smart, able to do college level work, where institutions are often saying fundable, right? They’re admitting someone who’s indicated that they’re going to stay on campus for four years and pay whatever percentage of tuition we’ve decided to take from you, we’ve decided that you’re going to be able to give us.

So, I think there is a conflict in expectations. There’s a conflict in what’s going on. I think institutions need to be more clear in that we think you can academically do the work, but with all the other factors of what we’re trying to drive here, somebody who is going to be a nurse instead of a business person, we need more nurses, we just started a nursing program, right?

I think things like that help make the process more transparent. I think the issue has to be, are we clearly providing an opportunity for students to continue their learning and take that learning with them to a… I’m hesitating on a successful career because the Chetty Group has ruined the term success. They define success as, like, Wall Street Journal or New York Times or top 1% of income. It was a really narrow weird definition, right?

So, these vague definitions and rankings do the same. When we say best school, that means nothing. It could mean the school with the most money. So, I think that we have to define more closely these terms we’re using to discuss an educational process, which I don’t think we’re doing a very good job of right now. And I think institutions need to do a better job of that so students more fully understand what they’re getting into and what the value of it should be.

[00:20:59] Gil: Yeah, I think the word I would use is “fulfilling.” The challenge, though, is that fulfillment needs to be aligned with the investment that you made, right? And you don’t want to over-invest in something that is not, then, what you’re doing. And I think for forever, the joke of higher ed has always been, you know, how many people are working in jobs that are not in the major they went to school for?

And it’s like that’s framed as a bad thing because it makes higher ed look like, oh, it’s a bad investment, but you’re missing the point on all of the other elements of higher ed. Yet, we’re in an environment where there’s a constant now drive around skills-based education and skills measurement. And I think we’re in a unique situation where the conversation has never been more complex when it comes to defining all of those things. My definition of success is going to be different than yours. It’s, like, we were talking some inside baseball. For our listeners, prior to hopping on, we were talking about the state of youth sports in this country, right, and how you’re either keeping up with the Joneses and playing baseball year-round, but you’re not going to be able to keep up, or on the other hand, you just don’t play at all, right?

And so, I think there’s parallels here with how we treat things like youth sports in this country and how we treat colleges in this country and going to college in this country. And the culture is you either go or you’re a failure. And that’s not the case, right? Or you either get a job in your major or it was a waste of your time. And we’re doing broad brushes and broad strokes on the black and white when it’s a lot of gray, right, when it comes to looking at the outcomes and measuring what we define as success.

So, I know we’ve talked about a lot here in a very short period of time. I’d love for you to, kind of, just for our audience, give a little bit more ways that we can keep in touch with you, ways that, you know, ways to continue this conversation, and then we can go from there.

[00:22:50] Akil: Sure. I am a social media addict, somewhat. So, you can find me on all the things. Probably be on Twitter until it burns. I’m Akil Bello on darn near all the platforms, LinkedIn, Twitter. So, I’m easily followed. I also have my own blog, akilbello.com, which I don’t contribute to as much as I should. But you know, I’m not hard to find on… usually, Twitter or LinkedIn are my primary places for pontificating about all things education-related.

[00:23:22] Gil: Awesome. Awesome. Well, we’ll put the links to your bios to make it super easy in our episode notes for the podcast. And Akil, I appreciate you taking the time. And I know this is a topic that you’re passionate about and a topic that’s super important and super complex. So, we’ll look forward to keeping the conversation going over the next few weeks.

And of course, we thank our audience for listening. And we’ll see you all next time on FYI.

[00:23:48] Akil: Thank you.[00:23:49] Gil: Bye!

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