Ela+Y’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2016


 * Profitting Off of Students**

High school: the four years of your life in which you sell your soul to the college board, ACT, and all of the “test-prep” companies. I’m sure all of you as juniors in this rigorous environment have faced the immense amount of pressure when faced with college admissions. We’re all struggling to juggle perfect grades, extracurriculars, clubs, journalism, bioscience, APs, the SAT, the ACT, and subject tests. And what else was there? Oh yeah, our life and sleep. Do we even have a life anymore? Do we even get sleep anymore? I’m honestly not sure. And what is all of this effort for? Of course, it’s for going to a “prestigious” school, entering the golden gates of the Ivy leagues, getting admitted to one of the “Top 100” colleges. And I totally get it, I feel the same. I want to go to one of those “prestigious” schools too. But our biggest problem is that the entire college admissions system had warped into a hideous monster that is blocking our way to the golden gates of the UCs and Ivy Leagues. The system is so messed up that the testing companies as well as the testing preparation companies are making billions of dollars off of us and our family, all while putting even more requirements for us to get into a decent college. Let me elaborate on that. While all of you took your SAT this year, and your parents paid for your admission ticket with their hard-earned money, the college board earned an average of 298 million dollars of profit. That’s right: 298 million dollars. And 291 million of those dollars came from your family’s money. And guess how much money the college board needs to actually run their business? Around 182 million dollars. So they made 116 million dollars of pure profit which was in no way used for education or benefit of students, but for their own good. In fact, the president of the College Board makes over 350,000 dollars a year, with 54,000 dollars in additional benefits, while all of the Board Vice Presidents earn over 125,000 dollars a year with benefits (fairtest.org). So, by overpricing their tests, selling us their test-prep books and charging us unnecessary fees, the College Board earns themselves millions of dollars of profit. It seems to me that instead of putting priority on the hard working students that are actually forced to take this test for many of the colleges they want to go to, the College Board puts priority on themselves. And the cycle keeps repeating itself. In addition to this, virtually all students spend tens of thousand of dollars on attending test-prep companies and buying testing preparation materials. Companies such as Kaplan, The Princeton Review, Compass, and Elite Test Preparation are making millions of dollars off of students, who are trying to “good-enough” score for the college they want. I have personally met dozens of kids from Westlake High School who casually tell me “Yeah, I’ve been going to *insert testing company here* since I was in 8th grade and I’ve been taking the SAT/ACT preparation course for four whole summers in a row and the four entire school years. Also I’m taking a whole year course for all of my school classes as well as for the AP test and I have a college counselor that I pay 20,000 dollars for who is going to write my admissions essays for me.” What? Sorry but who are you- or should I say what are you? Are you even human? Honestly, when I hear things like this I am so disgusted. Since when did virtually living in a testing company and having them and a college counselor do everything for you for thousands of dollars become normal? When did we begin to accept as a society that going to school and then going to a testing company for five hours, coming home at 9:00 pm and then doing your schoolwork until 4:00 am become normal? What happened to valuing genuine hard work, of valuing results that you students get through a learning and through their own cultivation of their own work and not through corporations? And the truly sad thing is, these crazy testing company fetuses are chosen by college admissions officers over genuinely hard working people. After all, when looking at two applications and seeing that test-prep fetus got a perfect score on their SAT/ACT, perfect score on their AP tests, had a brilliantly written essay and a perfect application, and then seeing the genuine application that is still very good, but has flawed brilliance, they almost always chose the “perfect” test prep fetus. Because, the admission officer doesn’t know that the test prep fetus prepared for the SAT/ACT since 8th grade, they don’t know that they actually had a professional counselor did their application for them. So, they take them as a “perfect” student and choose them. And this is one of the ways in which the college admissions system is majorly flawed. There is no way to tell between a test-prep fetus and a genuinely hard working student. And that makes an extremely unfair comparison of applications. An admissions employee will never know if one of the student’s result is because of their own work or if it is because their parents sent them to a test prep company. And either way, nobody should have to be a test prep fetus, it is truly inhumane. In fact, none of us should have to go to test-prep companies. In addition to this, the value of immensely high reach SAT and ACT scores is highly overvalued in admissions and this further adds to the increased selection of test prep fetuses. Virtually all of the Ivy Leagues, UCs, and even other more reasonable colleges will not admit a student with a test score lower than their average score. And the average score for these colleges has an average cut off rate of 33 for ACT and 1450 for SAT, and that is just the cut off where you barely have a chance. There are even dozens of websites that’s sole purpose is to calculate the percentage of the chance of admission to a certain college with a certain score. This means that in order to have a valid chance at getting admitted to the college of a student’s choice, they have to be in the 99th percentile of above. That is just plain crazy. It is also immensely unfair to students who just might not be able to reach that percentile because they just might not be good at a test that was generalized for millions of people. After all, there is no one test that could possibly match every student’s talents and preferences. This is why people have to resort to test prep companies to get impossibly high scores, which in return ends up earning millions of dollars of profit for the test prep companies. Yet, logically, if the SAT and ACT truly tests the skills we learn in school, as they say so themselves, we should be able to get a very high score without spending a single dollar on test-prep courses or materials. But I can honestly tell you that I have not met a single person who has gotten a score that is “good enough” for the college they want without attending a course or doing some sort of test-prep. And that is just so disappointing. Not to mention that this test prep method discludes the millions of students in poverty, who would not even be able to afford a test prep book, and therefore would not be able to get into the preferred percentile for the colleges they want. This also weighs in on the inequality between socioeconomic classes and the privilege that wealthy people receive in admissions. The cycle of using test prep in order to reach this artificial level of “intelligence” on standardized test, has created a system in which the top one percent can stay the top one percent because they are the ones that can pour their money to test prep to give their children an edge on testing. Meanwhile, genuine students and students in poverty end up being pushed into the 99 percent. To me, it is clear to see that the college admissions process has become ridiculously dependant on standardized testing that seems to exist solely for the profit of testing, test prep companies, the wealthy and those willing to become test prep fetuses. But even worse, my fellow juniors, our options are shrinking. With the requirements of getting into college soaring at an all time high, and the admission rates of all colleges, not just Ivy Leagues and UCs, shrinking into the impossible it is becoming harder and harder for teenagers to get admitted into decent colleges. In addition to this, the rankings of colleges and what is seen as a good college seems to come from the fact that these colleges have a ridiculously low admission rate. A school that has a 6 percent admission rate and requires at least a 35 on the ACT or a 1550 on the SAT would immediately be considered a “good” college. But, why? And how come the rankings never include the quality of teaching or how happy the students are at the college? Aren’t these the most vital factors? Because being selective does not necessarily mean that the quality of education or the experience is good. And with this ranking system, the truly precious colleges with genuine students and teacher and high quality learning are completely ignored by students. All of the students end up aiming for the same 20 colleges and therefore these colleges end up becoming more and more selective. Meanwhile, a perfect opportunity for a truly beneficial education is missed by millions. We as students and as a society really need to consider colleges that actually value the core values of education and us as humans and not testing robots, instead of just choosing colleges based on admission rates. Furthermore, I am disgusted to be in a generation where after an excited fellow student tells a college admissions employee about all of the hundreds of things they have achieved and the employee responds with a “Yeah, so what? You need to do more.” More? What more do you want? I mean, I’m sorry that none of us have cured Meningitis yet, but what else could you possibly want? How in the world can we treat students this way? We need students to be happy and have an actual life, and have a fair admissions process. We just can’t keep going in this insane cycle. This is why I want to grow old in an America where the college admissions process is not a ridiculous, for-profit, stressful experience but a fair and genuine one. Our students deserve better than to be treated as lifeless test-prep fetuses. Their genuine hard work and passion needs to be appreciated, and they need to stop getting robbed by testing companies. Together, believe that we can change this system together, one step at a time. Thank you.

www.fairtest.org
 * Sources **

http://blog.prepscholar.com/act-percentiles-and-score-rankings http://www.collegesimply.com/