Why is the university of California dropping the SAT?

A state government might have a very liberal or conservative party in power ... and a given policy might be considered the opposite, but they're not going to revisit it all the time.

The reasons for the policy too might have nothing to do with 'conservative' and 'liberal'.

Personally, I'm not really sure I buy into the idea that any given University has to have a given admissions policy and be 'liberal' or 'conservative'. There's room for a mix of policies across universities IMO / should be a mix.

Fankly I think you could tell most people any random policy is 'conservative' or 'liberal' and they'd just support or oppose it based on that label.

Definitions are all dorked up... and 'conservative' and 'liberal' is too weird and narrow a lens to view everything through.

Just as an example George W. Bush ran a campaign that very vocally opposed "nation building", it was thought to be a very important conservative value. George W. Bush then started the largest / longest nation building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan in decades ...

These terms often don't make any sense when applied.

Seriously, you can’t justify a wealthier neighborhood being entitled to better schools when they’re public institutions receiving state and federal funds. Evening out this funding is the only real step to giving students a more equitable future, but nobody would dare try it and put their own school district’s budget in jeopardy!

They want to fix the problem? Create an executive order requiring that all public schools who receive federal funding must have a percentage of their local funds be distributed at a state level, inversely to the funds generated locally.

The reason this exists is that it's effectively an affirmative action program for both urban segregated schools and rural schools, which combined have enough political power to pull this off. I believe political dynamics in CA wouldn't allow for this to be constructed - note that suburbs in general fight against such policies.

UT itself generally doesn't like the state mandated policy because it results in a less academically strong cohort than other flagship universities, reducing its rank.

Whether one school's admission program is "better" or not depends on what you view as the purpose of universities (something often lost in these conversations). Are you weighing more academically similar cohort (in which case purely predictive measures of performance are most appropriate) or some sort of equity metric where putting students from less socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds with stronger ones can result in higher upward mobility? One can certainly make the case that the Texan system could be failing on both accounts compared to say UCs, but you'd need to try to build a causal model to understand which school is producing better results for students that arrive.

It also encourages zero-sum thinking generally.