The obvious question for everyone outside of the administration is: why is this what needs to be cut? Why, after a five percent tuition increase and a robust financial compensation package for our president do we need to cut the safety net for our employees? The outward way the administration is handling this deficit — with a guarded calm — is admirable, but their priorities need to include the well being of those who nurture Oberlin everyday so it can continue to thrive. The two percent salary increase cap was an unfortunate but perhaps defendable measure. Expending the well being of everyone, from CDS worker to department chair, in order to shield the revenue shortfalls from students and their “academic experience” is both wrong and potentially dangerous.

A liberal institution like Oberlin should be aware that giving back fairly to its employees is in the long term interest of the College. When professors do not stay late during faculty meetings and spend personal time fighting petty cuts to their healthcare program, when union employees are not compelled to come out six months before contract negotiations to preempt the College’s threats of cutbacks, only then can both the administration and College employees work together in the best interest of the students.

Right now, the administration is scrambling to pretend the budget crisis doesn’t exist for students. But their efforts could have dire consequences in the near future.

Reconsider SAT

For current students, the SAT is a matter of the past, something we don’t think about as an issue that affects our Oberlin experience. But with the changing of the test’s format next year, now is a good time reconsider this admissions requirement.

It seems that in the recent past the College has lost some of its progressive edge, justifying changes by saying “this is how our peer institutions do it.” Perhaps, then, the College should examine the growing list of comparable institutions that have ceased to require the SAT—a list that includes Bard, Bates, Bowdoin and Mount Holyoke. Hamilton, Middlebury, Sarah Lawrence and Ursinus, among others, have waived the SAT requirement for students who meet other criteria.

Perhaps these institutions have considered the well-documented and much-debated disparities in scores based on race, income and gender—disparities that, with the exception of the gender gap, the new format seems unlikely to address. These are big problems—too big to tackle within this space.

But there are other reasons that the College should consider making the SAT optional.

Consider the following: In 1997, the Educational Testing Service, the “non-profit” organization behind the tests, took in $437 million in revenue. Considering the price of taking the SAT has risen at rate almost one and a half times the rate of inflation, that number is undoubtedly substantially larger.

Consider also that ETS has five employees making more than $250,000 a year, and more than 700 others making upwards of $50,000. The vice president of the organization earns $358,000 while the president earns $339,000 and lives in an artistic masterpiece of a house on the expansive property that ETS owns in Lawrence Township, N.J.

Students meanwhile, shell out more than $50 million a year on testing and other related services, each of which carries an additional charge. Students spends an additional $50 million each year on courses and other preparatory materials for the test. The colleges and universities, on the other hand, pay nothing to ETS for score reports or the student information that accompanies them. And if the SAT is free to them, what motivation do schools have to stop requiring it?

It is encouraging that Oberlin College admissions officers emphasizes that the SAT plays only a minor role in the admissions process, that it is only one factor among many. But if it is such a small part of the picture, is it ethical to continue requiring that students line the pockets of an organization that is non-profit by definition only?

It is time to say goodbye to ETS and its multimillion-dollar test.

–Editor-in-chief, Douglass Dowty
–Commentary Editor, Margaret Carey
–Managing Editors, Eric Klopfer, Steven Kwan, Colin Smith

Editorials are the responsibility of the Review editorial board—the Editor in Chief
and Commentary Editor—and do not necessarily reflect the view of the staff
of the Review.