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It’s been just ten days since the Justice Department decided to drop its lawsuit against Yale for discriminating against Asians and Whites in the undergraduate admissions process. This is not surprising and is mostly about politics and the differences between the Trump and Biden administrations. However, the group, Students for Fair Admissions, which brought (and lost) a similar complaint against Harvard, says it will pick up the suit and refile it under its own name. We don’t think it stands much of a chance, not just because of the precedent in the Harvard case, but also because suits like this will get harder to prove in the future as test-optional admissions continues to permeate elite schools.
So do these schools really need standardized tests? No, they don’t.
If you followed the case that Students for Fair Admissions originally brought against Harvard back in 2014, you may remember that a good number of stats about testing were part of the argument. Specifically, Asians (and to a lesser extent, whites) theoretically need to score higher on the SAT to earn admission to top schools at the same rate as other groups, like African-American and Latinx kids. The reported numbers varied, but a frequently published “Asian penalty” depicts the score differential at about 150 points. Everything else about the Harvard case centered on the school’s unpublished “Personal Rating” and how it was consistently lower for Asian students. But even that was frequently juxtaposed against the scores - because scores are the only truly standardized part of the admissions process and so they act as a benchmark for all admissions decisions. So what happens when those scores go away? It becomes a lot harder to assign a “penalty” to any ethnic group. And that’s exactly what these elite schools want.
Top schools want to be free to choose their class as they see fit. If that means admitting more first generation students, or students of color, or anything else they desire, they don’t want standardized tests, and the lawsuits they encourage, to stand in their way. Yes, the ACT and SAT were an easy measure of student quality and kept a lid on application volume - as long as everyone required them. But they’ve also proven to be highly correlated with family income, as everyone knows that expensive test prep does work to raise kids scores. Virtually every family we work with has paid for some type of test prep that many low-income students cannot pay for, which chips away at the “standardization” benefit in a way that colleges fully understand. And let’s not forget that most schools also know that the SAT and ACT don’t provide much more indication of success in college than grades alone do (also proven many times). So do these schools really need standardized tests? No, they don’t. And we believe they will continue to move away from them, with one of the key benefits being that lawsuits focusing on discrimination become a lot harder to prove.
