How Our Obsession With College Prep Hurts Kids

M ost schools say they’re preparing children for college and a career. Ted Dintersmith argues that today’s K-12 education is preparation for neither.

What the system is doing instead, says the education reformer, philanthropist, and retired venture capitalist, is training kids to apply to college, mainly by having them study certain subjects and regurgitate facts and equations on standardized tests. And that kind of learning is useless for career development, he says, when the work world is about to be dominated by machines that can spit out information in microseconds.

Consider calculus and statistics: Colleges want to see the former on an applicant’s transcript, because it’s difficult and serves to rank and weed out students. But few people use calculus in their jobs. Knowledge of statistics, on the other hand, is crucial to many emerging careers, not to mention one’s own life.

In his new book, What School Could Be (Princeton), Dintersmith says that students caught up in the “college for all” drive are wasting time and money. Many are stressed out or disengaged. To get them ready for college, work, and whatever the future holds, he argues, we should make learning relevant and fun.

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How is the college-prep drive hurting kids?

Learning isn’t interesting to a lot of kids when it’s theory-only. And I’m skeptical that they are learning that much on the strictly academic path. I write about MIT and Harvard, where they’re looking at very accomplished undergraduates — by academic standards — with science backgrounds, and they can’t deal with the simplest questions about how the world works. That begs the question: Is science about memorizing equations and definitions, or is it about creating and advancing new theories to shed light on how the world works? Most people would say it’s clearly the latter.

When you look at, for instance, the AP course track, people can say all they want that it’s reflecting that kids are learning how to think. That’s not what I see. I see kids doing a lot of content coverage — memorizing a lot of things, cramming for the exam, and, to a very large extent, hating that experience — and deciding they are not interested in that field as a career path. We can do better.

You talk to students and employers in Boston, and Northeastern University and Olin College are the places people want to go because they’re connecting academic learning to the real world. I don’t see why all kids aren’t encouraged to create their own year away from college, dealing with all of the ambiguity and messiness of the real world. You’d have to back off from all the distribution requirements — take these 12 courses to complete your major and blah, blah, blah. A lot of those are things, even if you go into that field, you’re never going to use.

So college could be a lot shorter than four years?

If you wanted to think really boldly, you’d say, Why not let kids come and go? Spend a year in college, get some experience, begin to get a sense of what they might be interested in. Leave for a year or two and work, maybe have some of that count as college credit. Redirect their focus or their interest, come back, learn some more things. That doesn’t sound like a crazy notion to me. Right now a lot of kids just roll out of high school, go into college. They spend the first year finding their way, often not very productively.

You’re asking a lot of kids to basically throw a dart and say, I think I want to be an accountant or an anthropologist or whatever. When I went to college, that dart cost me next to nothing. Too many kids today are throwing darts blindfolded, landing in a bad place or missing the dartboard entirely, and leaving with a ton of student-loan debt. That is crippling.

Wouldn’t letting kids explore and learn by doing advantage those with substantial resources and support for education at home?

We’ve got the highest level of childhood poverty of any developed country in the world. And what do we do? We hold kids and their teachers accountable for test scores on material they have no interest in, and blame the teachers for poor scores when students are facing a broad range of life-threatening challenges. I’ve found that when you give those kids something they care about, you shift the dynamic.

When it comes to test prep, the rich kids have parents who are on it like a dog on a pork chop. They’ll hire a test-prep tutor, or they’ll give their kids a new iPhone for getting their test scores above a threshold. But you put those kids in real-world challenges, where it’s not clear what you’ve got to do to get an A, and a lot of those micromanaged, affluent kids fall apart.

With the kids who are dealing with all sorts of challenges day-to-day at home, let them work on something they’re interested in, and you’ll find that they are really resourceful. When you instead say, “This is what the College Board tells you to learn” — Chaucer, or closed-form integrals, or cell replication, or whatever the College Board decides is college-ready preparation — you’re losing a lot of kids along the way, because they ask, “Is there really a good chance I’m ever going to use this in my life?” If you’re honest, you’d say, “No.”

You’re critical of standardized testing, but if we use looser, more individual forms of assessment, wouldn’t that take more time and introduce the possibility of bias?

Well, there’s bias already, right? In venture capital, to evaluate people for investment, I would ask for writing samples. Just write about something you’ve done in the past you’re really proud of. I read those and got a good sense of people in five minutes. Then I would call them and ask a few questions about what they wrote. If they bluffed their way through the answer, I wasn’t impressed. But if they could show they’d become an expert, then that was somebody I would take really seriously.

For an admissions office that gets deluged with applications, could we anonymize and crowdsource the evaluation of digital portfolios? I’d love to see colleges embrace applicants who can demonstrate that they’ve really made a difference in the world instead of submit a bunch of scores and numbers that are, at best, loosely correlated indicators of downstream impact to life.

Much of the college-for-all push comes from employers, who say they want workers with four-year degrees.

In my last book, with Tony Wagner, Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era, we write about Sherwin-Williams, the paint store. They’ll hire you out of high school. You can work in that paint store for 10 years and be exemplary in every aspect, but they won’t promote you to manager unless you get a college degree. When a company says, We will trust some four-year college over our own informed observations over a decade, they might as well just say, We have no confidence in our judgment as an organization or an enterprise.

A lot of legacy companies put that up as a barrier, and if they think about it narrowly, it’s a costly barrier to put up. It’s a tidy, convenient screening mechanism: Why not transfer back onto families in America an obligation to spend that much money on a four-year degree?

You are contributing to the unraveling of our democracy when you suddenly say that every family, no matter what their income level is, no matter what their means, needs to put up that kind of money for their kids to get to life’s starting line.

You say our democracy won’t survive if we don’t change the education system. Why?

We have sector after sector where automated solutions are being rolled out, and they’ll be pervasive in 10 or 15 years. The bar to be able to support yourself is just going up and up. If you’re keeping groceries on the table by driving an Uber, what happens in 10 years, when all Ubers are autonomous? Millions and millions of people cut adrift, alienated, on the sidelines. Then what happens? We saw that play out in November of 2016.

What happens if we don’t find far better ways for people to plug into education, in cost-effective and time-effective ways, and leave with the skills and the mind-set to actually do well in our world? That’s what worries me. Instead we’re taking these precious years of school and turning them into this march toward more and more years of formal instruction. Our mantra is higher test scores on more rigorous college-ready content, so that every kid goes to a four-year college.

For every kid who succeeds at that, there are going to be five to 10 for whom it’s a particularly terrible path. When they end up as adults with no hirable skills, feeling left out and marginalized, what happens to our democracy? Game over.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.