A Comeback For Merit In College Admissions

With Dartmouth bringing back standardized testing and Virginia moving to ban legacy advantage, the system is becoming fairer.

Dartmouth College. (Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.)

At the start of the pandemic, many undergraduate universities in the United States eliminated the requirement that applicants submit an SAT or ACT score. Initially, this was a practical decision. Cramming millions of teens into testing centers before the winter application deadlines would have been a logistical nightmare given COVID rules, so most institutions changed their admission requirements. Between the spring of 2020 and the winter of 2021, the number of four-year schools allowing students to decide for themselves whether to submit test scores nearly doubled from 713 to 1,350. 

But the rationale for these flexible admission standards soon evolved. Progressive activists and politicians latched onto the new change, arguing that it doubled as a way to promote equity and diversity in higher education. According to these critics, standardized testing is a “pillar of systemic racism” that is “at war with” diversity. Their argument relies on the test’s allegedly racist history and the fact that white, Asian, and upper-class students tend to outperform their black, Hispanic, and lower-class counterparts.

The initial pandemic-related reason for test-optional changes made perfect sense, but any rationale that relied on the principles of diversity or social justice was always misguided. Far from being an engine for inequality, standardized tests like the SAT and ACT are a leveling device. It is true that scores tend to vary by class and race, but those variations are a reflection of broader inequalities rather than evidence that the test is biased. 

The same cannot be said for any other aspect of the application packet, which can, to some extent, be bought and paid for. A privileged student might be able to afford impressive extracurricular and leadership activities, hire an editor to help craft their personal statement, or attend a private school with more attentive college counselors—but they cannot purchase a good SAT score. And while test preparation services can have an impact on test scores, and are more available to wealthy students with the requisite resources and time, there are free preparation programs available—and in any case, experts believe the rich-student advantage in test preparation is “very small” to begin with. As Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, professor of public policy at the University of Southern California puts it, standardized tests are one of “the only remotely ‘objective’ measures of performance that our brilliant pupils of all backgrounds have.”

For over three years, most colleges seemed to have abandoned the idea of ever returning to mandatory testing. That is, until Monday, when Dartmouth College announced that it would be reinstating its testing requirement next year. This decision followed a report by four Dartmouth professors showing that standardized test scores “are significantly predictive of academic success at Dartmouth and increase the likelihood that Admissions will be positioned to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants.” This change has so far happened at only a handful of well-known schools (MIT also reinstated mandatory testing back in 2022), but the fact that they are among the country’s most prestigious academic institutions is a sign that other schools may soon begin to reconsider the merits of mandatory testing as well. 

Viewed in a broader context, Dartmouth’s policy change is just one of several indications that college admissions are moving in the right direction. In Virginia, policymakers just passed a bill to end legacy advantage at all of the state’s public universities, and the governor has signaled that he intends to sign it. Legacy advantage, which gives descendants of a particular college’s alumni a boost in the admissions process at that college, is blatantly unfair and overwhelmingly benefits the rich. According to a recent study, the children of the super-wealthy are more than twice as likely as middle-class students with comparative test scores to attend elite universities. The largest factor behind this is the preferential admission given to legacy students. 

While there are certain advantages to legacy admissions—like encouraging donations and engagement from alumni—those positives do not come close to outweighing the corrupting impact it has on the admissions process. Importantly, the development in Virginia comes in the wake of other institutions doing away with legacy advantage in the past five years, including Wesleyan University, John Hopkins University, and Amherst College. 

Then there is the most significant change to college admissions in decades—the end of racial preferences. Last June, the Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious admissions processes, which date back to the 1960s and are commonly known as affirmative action, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The end of racial discrimination is an unambiguous victory for merit in college admissions. 

The overwhelming majority of Americans agree that acceptance to elite institutions of higher education should be based on academic excellence. 85 percent believe that standardized testing should be a factor in college admissions. 70 percent believe that colleges “should not be allowed to consider legacy status when deciding which students to admit.” And 68 percent (including majorities of every racial demographic) “think the Supreme Court’s ruling to end the use of race/ethnicity in admission decisions for colleges and universities was mostly a good thing.”

Of course, it’s important to recognize that even if every college in the nation adopted these popular policies, the admissions process would still not be a true meritocracy. Students applying from private high schools have a tangibly unfair advantage over public school students; athletic recruitment is a workaround to the traditional admissions process and is exploited by wealthy families; and some parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on admissions coaches to help their children get into elite colleges. These practices distort the admissions process to favor the wealthy and privileged. 

But it’s impossible to dismiss these recent important steps in the right direction. For now, advocates of fairness and merit can cheer the incremental steps we’ve seen in the past weeks at Dartmouth and in Virginia. Then, they should continue pressing the rest of the country’s academic institutions to follow suit.

Seth Moskowitz is an associate editor at Persuasion.

---

Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below: