It's not (just) about barring Asians; colleges are ensuring that the Supreme Court's impending bar to affirmative action will be moot

80% of US colleges have dropped the SAT

I’ve been saying this for months, and Hot Air’s finally caught on: by dropping objective standards, colleges can continue doing what they’ve been doing with impunity.

Hot Air

As the college application process picks up steam for the upcoming academic year, a new survey shows that more than 80% of U.S. bachelor-degree granting institutions will not require students seeking fall 2023 admission to submit either ACT or SAT standardized exam scores…

“An overwhelming majority of undergraduate admissions offices now make selection decisions without relying on ACT/SAT results,” said FairTest Executive Director Harry Feder in the organization’s news release. “These schools recognize that standardized test scores do not measure academic ‘merit.’ What they do assess quite accurately is family wealth, but that should not be the criteria for getting into college.”

Schools are moving to phase out the tests not because they want to admit a different group of people, but because they are anticipating a Supreme Court ruling that will try to make them change who they admit, and they don’t want to do that…

From the perspective of Harvard and its peers, the concern is almost exclusively public relations. If they admitted students based purely on academic standards (i.e., no special consideration of race, alumni parents, sports, etc.), they would have many more Asian students, many fewer Black and Hispanic students, and a similar number of white students, but those white students would be from somewhat less-rich families. This would be bad for their social prestige and their fundraising, so they don’t want to do it. And that choice means that the next tier of colleges has to do the same thing or else they will be the schools with very few Black and Hispanic students. This entire program of anti-Asian racial discrimination exists to spare a small number of super-elite schools the embarrassment of publicly admitting that, on average, Black and Hispanic high school students do worse than white and Asian students, even though this is clearly visible in the NAEP scores and many other measures.