Record number of colleges drop SAT/ACT admissions requirement

The end goal is certainly to increase college enrollment among groups who have historically been underrepresented, and removing all academic and skill prerequisites from academic and skilled trades programs would certainly increase enrollment numbers, but by totally devaluing those programs in the process.

The enrollment and degree isn't what we should be trying to provide these groups it's the underlying knowledge and skills so they are prepared for these academic programs in the first place. This approach, though, is almost worse than doing nothing because it's pretending to help when it's actually just hurting everyone and serving the interests of the student loan industry in the process.

There was a story in the news that broke recently of a high school doing exactly what this is describing, sneaking disadvantaged kids into ivy league colleges when they didn't have any of the skills or knowledge required for the degree programs. Obviously it didn't go well.

You can find more information at

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/03/672817734/the-reality-of-t-m-...

There was also a really great Feakonomics podcast talking about America's math curriculum and how the SAT is changing to focus on the right kinds of skills.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/math-curriculum/

Selecting for prior academic success is a good way to predict future academic success — your analogy about encryption makes no sense at all. Academic success doesn’t fail in any of the same ways that encryption does.

But the problem is that selecting for prior academic success does not select for diversity, because the environments which support early adolescent academic success are not as diverse as colleges want their own student populations to be.

So colleges are left trying to increase the diversity of incoming freshman by passing over more academically successful candidates which don’t meet their diversity quotas.

There is tremendous value in having a diverse campus population, but the best way to get there is to have diverse academically successful applicants. Colleges aren’t willing to wait.

One problem is that these applicants are also generally paying a lot of money to attend these colleges, and if they ultimately aren’t going to be successful those colleges are causing significant harm by admitting them.

Note that one of the primary purposes of the SAT is to predict success in the first two years of college.

The not very good alternative is to lower academic standards in the classes themselves, and certainly there is anecdotal evidence of this but I’m not sure about rigorous studies.

For elite schools, it also makes it easier to provide cover for legacy and donor admissions. You no longer have to explain how Keese James Shackleford IV got into the the Shackleford school of dkljalfjaf while scoring just 950 on his SAT.