A Fight Over the Future of the SAT and Test-Optional Admissions

Colleges' "test optional" policies, many of which were adopted during the pandemic, are coming under increased fire from supporters of the SAT.

For the College Board, the stakes could not be higher. The SAT is, after all, the test company’s signature exam. But this is not just about saving the test. It’s also about protecting the lucrative businesses that the company has built off the exam, capitalizing on its enormous database of test-takers.

David Leonhardt of The New York Times got the ball rolling in January with a front-page article entitled “The Misguided War on the SAT.” The column argued that college applicants should be required to once again take the exams and submit their scores. "In today’s politically polarized country, however, the notion that standardized tests are worthless or counterproductive has become a tenet of liberalism," Leonhardt wrote. "It has also become an example of how polarization can cause Americans to adopt positions that are not based on empirical evidence."

In the weeks and months since Leonhardt's column ran, there have been nearly two dozen articles, op-eds, and editorials in newspapers around the country calling on colleges to abandon their test-optional policies (for example, see here, here, here, and here).

Many of the arguments against test-optional admissions echo those made in the 2018 John Hopkins University Press edited volume Measuring Success: Testing, Grades and the Future of College Admissions, which the College Board was intimately involved in producing. Two of the book’s three editors were College Board employees at the time, and, as Jon Boeckenstedt of Oregon State University has pointed out, the company’s communications team received a shout-out in the book’s acknowledgements for its “hard work and effort” on behalf of the publication.

A key argument that Measuring Success makes is that rampant grade inflation at our nation’s high schools have made grades a less reliable predictor of future college success than standardized test scores. Leonhardt repeats this claim in his column, relying in part on a study Dartmouth conducted of its unusually elite applicant pool. Other articles and opinion columns that have come over the past few months have made similar arguments, also relying on research that focuses only on the most selective colleges and universities. But a number of research studies, including those from the College Board and ACT themselves, confirm that, for the population of test-takers as a whole, high school grades remain superior to test scores in predicting how students will perform in college.

At the time that Measuring Success was published, the test optional movement was gaining momentum, with more than 1,000 colleges choosing to leave it up to applicants to decide whether or not to submit their standardized test scores. The number of test-optional colleges nearly doubled two years later, after the COVID-19 pandemic made it virtually impossible for millions of students to sit for SAT or ACT exams.

Today, more than 1,900 public and private colleges are test optional. Another 80, including the entire University of California and California State University systems, are “test blind,” meaning that they do not consider test scores at all. Over the last couple of months, several big-name institutions — Brown, Dartmouth, Yale, and the University of Texas at Austin — have decided to reverse course and require applicants to submit test scores again. However, most test-optional colleges will remain so, despite reporting from Leonhardt and his colleagues at The New York Times that makes it sound like the movement is collapsing.

In fact, many colleges that became test optional during the pandemic have found that they are attracting a larger and more diverse set of applicants than they previously had. And many of these institutions report that students who didn’t submit scores are generally performing as well as those who did. These colleges, in other words, have learned that they can live without the SAT.

The possibility that these colleges could eventually drop the SAT altogether poses a significant financial threat to the company, which reported more than $1 billion in revenue in 2022 (while the College Board is a nonprofit, it has long acknowledged that it operates like a business, and holds more than $2 billion in assets). According to the College Board’s latest 990 tax form, the test company earned about $289 million from its “SAT Suite of Assessments” in 2022, which represented more than a quarter of its total earnings. But the fight over the future of the SAT goes beyond protecting the test itself.

The College Board and ACT, for example, have dominated the student list business for decades. For a hefty fee, the test companies share with colleges personally-identifiable information they receive from the millions of students who annually take their exams. The colleges then use this information to recruit students. This business has become more lucrative as colleges compete ever-more fiercely for the students they desire, according to Ozan Jaquette and his research team at the University of California at Los Angeles, which has studied the student list marketplace. “Over the past two decades, the student list business has grown in scale, sophistication, and in importance to university recruiting campaigns,” they wrote in a series of papers for the Institute of College Access and Success (TICAS) in 2022.

The College Board has also used its enormous database of test-takers to become a player in the multi-billion-dollar enrollment management consulting business. Colleges that become clients of the College Board’s Enrollment Planning Service receive much-more detailed profiles of potential prospects. Jaquette and his colleagues explain:

When colleges buy student lists from the College Board, they receive only a subset of the information the agency knows about each prospect. The College Board’s Enrollment Planning Service gives colleges that become clients of its consulting services more-detailed data about these students, including data related to their academic achievement and where they are sending test scores. The value proposition that Enrollment Planning Service makes to colleges is this: Rather than buy lists from the College Board and work with a private enrollment management firm, purchase names and enrollment management consulting from the College Board and get access to prospect data that cannot be obtained from students lists and that can help the institutions make more efficient and effective decisions about recruiting interventions.

The College Board doesn’t disclose how much annual revenue it makes from the student list and enrollment management businesses. But in its 990 form, the test company reports that it earned $107 million in 2022 from “College & Career Opportunities & Enrollment,” which likely includes those businesses.

In the coming weeks, I will be taking a closer look at the arguments that are being made about test-optional admissions and the role that the big testing companies play, and reviewing the research that has been done on this topic.