ARE YOU SMART

ENOUGH?
How Colleges’ Obsession With
Smartness Shortchanges Students

Alexander W. Astin

STERLING, VIRGINIA
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Names: Astin, Alexander W.
Title: Are you smart enough? : how colleges’ obsession with
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Description: Sterling, Virginia : Stylus Publishing, 2016. |
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 INTRODUCTION

A
merica’s universities are the envy of the world. In a recent
international poll, 21 of the 30 top-ranked universities
(and 7 of the top 10) were American (World University
Rankings, 2014). American scientists, working mostly in uni-
versities, have been awarded more than a third of all the Nobel
Prizes ever awarded (Fisher, 2013). Even more striking, of the 10
universities with the most Nobel Prize laureates on their faculty,
8 are located in the United States (Nobel Laureates by University,
2009).
It comes as no surprise that colleges and universities value
the intellect—or what, for the purposes of this book, I have cho-
sen to call smartness. After all, you have to be pretty smart to
get into a good college, to earn good grades, to enroll in and
complete a doctoral program, or to be awarded a Nobel Prize.
Every college or university obviously seeks to enroll the smartest
students it can attract and to hire the smartest professors it can
find. However, what may not be so obvious—the problem that
motivates me to write this book—is that too many of the 1.5
million faculty members who staff our 4,000-plus institutions
of higher learning have come to value merely being smart more
than developing smartness! Developing students’ talents is, after
all, the principal mission of any educational institution—to help
students learn, grow, and develop into competent and responsi-
ble citizens, parents, employees, and professionals.
This problem has enormous implications for prospec-
tive college students and their parents. Parents understandably
assume that colleges exist in order to “add value” to their stu-
dents, not merely to identify and certify the smartest ones. But in
most colleges and universities, although faculty may be able tell
you who their smartest students are, they usually can’t tell you
what their students are actually learning, or how each student is
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1
2 ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH?

growing and developing. This is because their favored assessment

methods—course grades and standardized tests—can single out
the smartest students but are not very useful in revealing what
students are learning and how they are developing over time.
Equating student smartness with standardized test scores
like the SAT and the ACT also oversimplifies the remarkable
diversity of human talent. Because most colleges and universities
are committed to fostering the development of a much richer
and broader array of talents, including qualities such as creativ-
ity, leadership, critical thinking, citizenship, social responsibility,
empathy, and self-understanding, there is no way that smartness
can realistically be reduced to a single narrow measure such as a
standardized test score.
Parents also need to realize that the pecking order of American
colleges and universities clearly favors the smartest students.
If your child is not among the 10%–15% with the best school
grades and highest standardized test scores, he or she will probably
not be admitted to a highly ranked college and will instead have
to attend a college that has larger classes, fewer facilities, and less
funding. And if applicants are not particularly well prepared for
college, they will have to contend with faculty members who
would rather be teaching better-prepared students. More parents
need to be asking, “Why should an educational system invest the
least in students who may need the most in higher education?”
These issues also have important implications for busi-
nesses, government agencies, schools, and others who hire col-
lege graduates. Colleges and universities were never intended to
exist simply to identify the smartest applicants at the time of
admissions and hand them credits and degrees four years later
on their way out. On the contrary, the quality of our national
talent pool depends heavily on how well colleges and universities
develop the students’ capacities during the college years. And this
means all students.
Our country cannot afford to educate only a select segment
of its populace. The United States is rapidly becoming a knowl-
edge-based society. Considering the growing diversity of its peo-
ple, it is critical that colleges and universities develop the talents
and creativity of all their students to prepare them to confront
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societal, and economic problems that
 INTRODUCTION 3

lie ahead. In the face of such a challenge, American higher educa-

tion can no longer simply assume that its students are developing
their talents to their fullest potential.
If higher education institutions could begin to monitor stu-
dent learning in a more systematic fashion, they might well be
able to devise more effective methods of teaching and mentoring
students at all levels of preparation. Further, if colleges were to
broaden their assessments to focus more attention on some of the
important qualities not currently reflected in standardized tests
and course grades—talents such as creativity, leadership, citizen-
ship, and teamwork skills—the capacity of our colleges to enrich
the educated workforce could be substantially strengthened.
Why does higher education assign such importance to
simply being smart? And why has it embraced such a narrow
definition of smartness? The core functions of almost every col-
lege or university—teaching and research—are under the control
of the faculty. Faculty decide what kinds of students should be
admitted, what to teach them, how they will be taught, and how
they will be tested and graded. Faculty choose the topics students
will study in their research and the methods they will employ in
carrying out that research. Faculty members also play a major
role in deciding which new colleagues get hired and which ones
get promoted, although administrators often have the final say in
such decisions. Many of these administrators, of course, happen
to be current or former faculty members.
Like any group of professionals, college professors have their
own culture, by which I mean their shared beliefs, the common
core values and principles that shape how they conduct their
teaching, research, and collegial relationships. Although certain
shared beliefs are openly acknowledged (e.g., academic freedom,
the search for truth) the central thesis of this book is that one
belief in particular tends to exert more influence on academic
practices and campus life than any other, even though it is little
understood and virtually never acknowledged. I like to refer to
this belief as

The importance of “being smart.”

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4 ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH?

There are many adjectives besides smart that could be used—

brilliant, creative, bright, intelligent, talented, knowledgeable—
but for simplicity I’m sticking with smart.
It is easy to understand why college professors value smart-
ness so much. Almost all of them are highly educated; a PhD, the
highest academic degree offered by a university, is a requirement
for employment in most faculty positions. You have to be pretty
smart to earn a PhD. Most faculty were also very good students
in school and college, receiving all kinds of honors and recogni-
tion for their academic accomplishments. And the yardsticks that
they have chosen for judging their students—school grades and
standardized test scores—are the same ones that enabled them to
reach the highest levels of academic achievement.
The faculty culture regards smartness in an almost reveren-
tial fashion. Colleagues who are viewed as especially smart are
treated with a great deal of respect and deference. Some faculty
members go out of their way to impress their colleagues with
their smartness. Others do their best to avoid being viewed as
“not smart enough.” Often these strategies can be highly disrup-
tive in faculty meetings and to faculty relations in general. Fac-
ulty members also go to great lengths to hire only the smartest
colleagues and to weed out those colleagues who turn out to be
“not smart enough.” The same goes for students. Faculty make
every effort to admit only the smartest applicants, to honor and
reward those admitted students who turn out to be the smartest
in their courses, and to get rid of those whose smartness fails to
measure up.
Recently, most selective colleges have come to rely increas-
ingly on standardized test scores rather than the more traditional
grade point average (GPA) from secondary school in making
admissions decisions. GPAs may not be comparable from school
to school, and GPAs have inflated over the years so that aver-
ages of 4.00 and above are now commonplace. Accordingly, elite
institutions have increasingly come to rely on the standardized
test score as the preferred indicator of smartness for admissions.
However, with few if any standardized tests suitable for assessing
students’ performance in college courses, the course grade and the
GPA remain as the preferred means of assessing smartness in col-
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 INTRODUCTION 5

It is important to recognize that the personal qualities meas-

ured by grades and test scores are not fixed. Indeed, there is
abundant evidence suggesting that these qualities are subject to
change. Between high school and college, for example, there is
a good deal of variation in who gets the best and worst grades
(Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991, 2005). Indeed, anyone who has
ever taught in high school or college knows of “late bloomers”
whose initially poor academic performance was subsequently
turned around. In terms of standardized tests, abundant evidence
shows that scores can be improved through coaching (Park &
Becks, 2015; Zwick, 2007). In fact, one of the major commercial
“test prep” companies, The Princeton Review, guarantees that it
can raise any client’s SAT composite score by at least 200 points
(The Princeton Review, n.d.a). This preoccupation with smart-
ness has also helped to create a pecking order of colleges and uni-
versities in which the elite or “top-ranked” institutions are those
that enroll the smartest students and standardized tests have
become the primary means of screening applicants. The “qual-
ity” or “excellence” of a college or university is thus judged on the
basis of the average test score of its entering students, rather than
on how well it educates them once they enroll. Such a widespread
reliance on test scores in college admissions has helped to give
rise to a burgeoning test prep industry that markets its costly
services to anxious students and parents who compete to get the
student admitted to a “high-quality” college near the top of the
pecking order.
Focusing so much on test scores and getting admitted to a
“good” college has caused many parents and students to forget
that the fundamental mission of any college or university is to
develop the intellect—to help students acquire the talents, skills,
knowledge, and personal qualities that are required for employ-
ment and responsible living in modern society. This same focus
also makes it difficult for colleges and universities to fulfill their
professed commitment to diversity and equality of opportunity.
Because students from low-income backgrounds and students
from underrepresented minority groups are at a competitive dis-
advantage when it comes to standardized test scores, they tend to
be excluded when colleges favor applicants with the highest test
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6 ARE YOU SMART ENOUGH?

gives favored treatment to its smartest students, even average

students are denied equal opportunities. If colleges were instead
to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and
capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation
might be equally valued.
The “publish-or-perish” philosophy that infects so many
colleges and universities is largely a manifestation of this same
obsession with smartness: Because publications have become the
principal yardstick of smartness in most academic fields, faculty
seeking promotions, candidates for faculty positions, and faculty
members who simply want to earn the respect of their colleagues
all invest an inordinate amount of time conducting research
and writing papers for publication. These practices also help to
explain why many university professors continue to invest rela-
tively little time in carrying out their teaching and mentoring
activities.
One of my hopes in writing this book is to make these issues
more salient, not only for college faculty but also for schoolteach-
ers, parents, and aspiring college students. Given that belief in
the importance of smartness has become such a fundamental yet
hidden part of the culture of the university, it is reasonable to ask
whether there is any realistic hope that college professors could
ever bring themselves to consider the possibility that developing
students’ talents is more important than merely identifying and
acquiring talented students. For this to happen, college and uni-
versity faculty would probably need to initiate an extended con-
versation about the culture of the university, and begin a serious
examination of the shared beliefs and values that help to shape
the policies and practices of our institutions of higher learning.

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