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The SAT's 100-year grip on higher ed

September 1, 2026

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5 min read

In 1933, as the Great Depression bottomed out, the new president of Harvard University, James Conant, looked out at his student body and saw a problem. The elite universities, he believed, were dominated by a "preppy aristocracy" of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from East Coast private schools—the wrong kind of people, in his view, to lead a nation in crisis. Conant, a middle-class son of a small business owner, wanted to find "natural talent" in the far corners of America, people of extraordinary intelligence who might otherwise spend their lives "walking behind a mule and a plough." His search for a test to identify these hidden gems—something "background free and curriculum free"—collided with a darker intellectual current sweeping through American academia: eugenics. The result was the SAT, a test that would reshape American higher education for the next century, for better and for worse.

The Eugenicist Roots of a Meritocratic Dream

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What you'll learn

  • 1 The SAT's 100-Year Grip on Higher Ed
  • 2 (00:00) **Episode Hook & Listener Question** - Hosts ask about SAT scores, revealing how personal and guarded they remain decades later, then introduce the episode's driving question from listener Jory Baker: "How did we get here?"
  • 3 (04:53) **1933: The Great Depression and a Crisis of Leadership** - America is at the bottom of the Depression, and Harvard's new president James Conant sees elite universities as captured by a "preppy aristocracy" he believes is incompetent to lead the nation.
  • 4 (06:45) **Conant's Jeffersonian Vision** - Conant borrows Thomas Jefferson's idea of a "natural aristocracy" based on virtue and talent, and becomes obsessed with finding hidden geniuses in far-flung corners of America.
  • 5 (08:48) **The Eugenicist Roots of Aptitude Testing** - Conant's dream collides with a new theory sweeping American academia: eugenics, which held that intelligence and social worth were fixed at birth and could be measured.
  • 6 (09:58) **World War I & the Army IQ Tests** - During WWI, the U.S. Army administers IQ tests to all military inductees to quickly sort recruits, determining who should be officers versus regular soldiers.
  • 7 (11:09) **The College Board Hires Brigham** - Brigham connects with the College Board, a group of elite East Coast universities standardizing admissions, and they hire him to develop a test measuring high school students' "lifelong intellectual potential."

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Show Notes

For generations, the SAT has loomed large in the lives of teenagers. The quest for a perfect or near-perfect score has filled many test takers with dread. In this episode, a listener's question makes us wonder... who decided the SAT was the best and brightest way to filter students? And how did it become the pathway to higher education in America?

Guests:

Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test and Higher Admissions

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