Baylor's Spending Spree

There's been fair amount of discussion and derision over Baylor University's decision to pay already-admitted freshmen to retake the SAT. What's been less prevalent is an analysis of what they paid and what they got for their money. Here's what they paid:

- 861 students retook the SAT and earned $300 bookstore credits. Cost: $258,300
- 150 students raised their score by at least 50 points, earning a $1,000 scholarship. Cost: $150,000
- Total cost to the university: $408,300

And here's what they got in exchange:
- a 10-point jump in their average SAT score. It went from 1200 to 1210.
- a mountain of bad publicity

Why would a college pay already-admitted students to retake a college admittance test? Because our reward structure is out of control. Because we use magazine rankings based on prestige and money as our most important measure of higher education quality. We could argue over whether it was logical for Baylor to devote its time and resources (spending time to create the program and spending $40,000 per point increase), but they were responding to a particular incentive. They were trying to game a flawed system, just as other universities have.

Baylor could have used the same amount of money to re-design their pre-calculus, psychology, or Spanish programs to enhance student learning and cut costs long-term. Instead, they took a short-term solution that has no added benefit to student learning or college quality.

Update: Baylor is abandoning the payments, because it had the "appearance of impropriety." It's not actually that the payments were improper, no, it's because they appeared that way.