Admitting you made a mistake is not easy. But faculty members at the University of California are calling on their employer to do just that.
The UC system — along with hundreds of other schools across the nation — is now several years into an experiment with test-optional admissions. The results are startling: At UC-Berkeley, a third of first-semester calculus students have “severe preparation deficits,” according to an open letter from UC’s STEM faculty. At UC-San Diego, the number of students with below-high-school math skills has increased by a factor of 30. UC professors are now urging their schools to reinstate testing requirements.
Most selective universities stopped requiring applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores during the COVID-19 pandemic. But even as the country reopened, test-optional and test-blind policies have largely remained. Some elite colleges have reinstated standardized test requirements in the last year, but most schools have demurred. Yet schools that refuse to consider standardized tests are hurting their own students most of all.
America has a college completion crisis: Just 61% of students who start college earn a degree within six years. Students who start college but drop out end up in the worst of both worlds: They spend (or borrow) money to pay tuition, but have no degree to help them earn it back. Because SAT and ACT scores contain important information about applicants’ readiness to do college-level work, institutions that refuse to consider standardized test scores do their own prospective students a disservice.
In a new report for the American Enterprise Institute, I examine how standardized test scores predict college completion rates for one of the last cohorts of students to apply to college under largely test-required admissions policies. The results show a clear and strong correlation between standardized test scores and college completion rates across more than 1,000 colleges that reject at least some applicants.
At colleges where at least three-quarters of students score at least a 1300 on the SAT, average completion rates exceed 90%. But among colleges with lower standards, completion rates plummet. If the 25th percentile SAT score for enrolled students drops by 100 points, the school’s estimated completion rate falls by roughly 10 percentage points. At colleges where the 25th percentile score is 900, the average completion rate is just 51%. Finishing college becomes a coin flip.
It’s possible that other factors explain the relationship between test scores and college completion. But the predictive power of test scores remains strong even after controlling for several other variables, including the type of institution, the socioeconomic status of each school’s student body, the financial resources available to each school, and even the school’s admissions rate. After accounting for all these factors, a 100-point rise in SAT scores still predicts an 8-percentage point rise in completion rates.
Baruch College in New York provides an instructive example. Around half of Baruch’s students are low-income, as measured by the share of the student body who use Pell Grants to pay for college. But the school nonetheless maintained high admissions standards: three-quarters of its entering class in 2018 scored above 1220 on the SAT (or the equivalent ACT score of 25). As a result, Baruch maintains a strong estimated six-year completion rate of 80%.
Even less selective schools can boast strong outcomes if they maintain high admissions standards. Auburn University admitted 75% of the students who applied in 2018. But three-quarters of the students who enrolled scored higher than 1200 on the SAT. Almost 90% of Auburn’s 2018 entering class completed a degree within six years.
These results are proof that universities need not be highly selective in order to post strong completion outcomes. They simply need to expect that entering students have a baseline level of academic preparation. Unfortunately, it will be far more difficult to assess students’ readiness for college — and hence their likelihood of completion — if schools do not require their applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores.
Despite pressure from faculty, the UC system has punted on the question of whether it will bring back standardized test score requirements. UC and other universities should remember that their responsibility is not just to help students access higher education, but to ensure that they can complete college once they start. Ignoring standardized tests means ignoring a potent tool to evaluate whether prospective students are prepared to finish their degrees. Colleges that want to help students flourish have a moral obligation to bring back standardized testing requirements.
ED SHEERAN SHOULD HAVE NEVER BOOKED MACKLEMORE TO BEGIN WITH
Preston Cooper is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where his work focuses on higher education return on investment, student loans, and higher education reform.
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