"Universities aim to boost bottom line by jettisoning SAT and ACT to gain freer hand in selecting entrants, some suggest.
Experts have warned that a push by US universities to end their reliance on standardised admissions tests may be gaining momentum for a little-acknowledged reason: its potential for driving up tuition fee revenue.
With the University of California system understood to be on the verge of joining the movement, the companies that prepare the tests are trying to stave off what would be an immense loss by warning that minority university applicants would be deprived of a crucial tool for proving their academic worth objectively.
Universities have been countering that argument by saying that academic studies and their own experiences have shown that high school grade-point averages are fairer and stronger predictors of college completion than the exams." …
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/revenues-may-lurk-behind-drive-end-us-admissions-tests
This article doesn’t mention another way in which dropping SATs can increase revenues, namely that it could ultimately limit the ability of lower ranking colleges to use merit to win high stat students from wealthier families away from need-only schools.
It seems to me that this is in part an attempt by need-focused colleges to gain an advantage by imposing their own preferences on competing schools that use merit as a driver of aid (eg UCs vs USC) or at the very least discredit those colleges that have relied on merit to attract high stat students and thereby improve their position in the rankings.
If families have fewer choices of colleges where they can pay less than their EFC, then on average they will end up paying more.
It’s interesting to see the tone of an article in the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-it-fair-to-award-scholarships-based-on-the-sat-11580639400) which notes that “Universities use merit aid to compete for students. Merit scholarships can make students feel wanted and prompt families to think they are getting a deal. The awards also help campuses lure top students from even more prestigious schools, a few dozen of which don’t offer merit aid at all.”
The WSJ goes on to cite criticism of this approach from a need based school: “The exams increase inequality when you look at who is getting access to aid,” said Laura Perna, professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Colleges are big businesses and act like it.
Doing away with standardized tests “allows them to admit more students, whose parents have money, with lower test scores.”
It would be interesting to see data on colleges who have gone TO and their net revenue trends on a per student basis.
Seems having the goal of increasing net revenues and increasing low SES and/or URM population can co-exist. Middle class non-URM students could be squeezed even more.
“It would be interesting to see data on colleges who have gone TO and their net revenue trends on a per student basis.”
I would suspect that at the top level, there isn’t much change in revenue, but they manage to goose up their reported test scores (which drives desirability and rankings) while maintaining their financial profile.
. . . or keep them from going down (and dropping from the rankings).
Given that too many people focus on USNews rankings, pretty much almost all the LACs (and other schools in rural and/or decreasing HS population areas) and the top publics (who have a mandate to take in kids from all demographics and geographical areas of a state so typically don’t focus on test scores as much) have an incentive to go test-optional. Also any schools that want to game the USNews rankings more heavily.
What are you quoting? I didn’t find that text in the article.
From reading CC, I’ve learned that using SAT tests for admission is discriminatory against lower income families and getting rid of the SAT for admission is discriminatory against lower income families…