Ditching the SAT is a Money Maker
I stay connected to a bunch of people at the City University of New York and Brooklyn College, where I used to work. The CUNY system is feeling a lot of strain; as I’ve said here several times before, most colleges are highly enrollment-dependent for basic fiscal solvency, and enrollment is down in CUNY generally. (Most blame Covid, but I suspect it’s more the job market.) But Hunter and Baruch are bright spots, likely because they have just dropped the SAT. This was sold in the name of equity, tearing down barriers for the marginalized. Of course, if reducing rigor in admissions means you let even more students in who will take on loan debt, struggle, then drop out, well….
At the top of the pyramid, elite schools with big endowments are less exposed to enrollment swings. But they need students whose parents will donate and who will in turn become donors after graduation themselves. And the SAT has traditionally been a barrier to harvesting the dullard sons of the 1% for that purpose. That’s who benefits the most from the demise of entrance tests, not poor Black strivers but those who could slouch their way to success everywhere but in the examination room.
Let me ask you, honestly: do you think the anti-SAT wave is really being powered by sociology professors and their demands for justice? Or is all about cash?
I think 'It's all about the cash' makes it seem like there's a top-down conspiracy here. I think it's a lot closer to 'the activists have a lot of dumb ideas but only the ones that are in sync with institutional goals are the ones that get through the filter'. 'Drop the SATs' gets through, 'give the endowment to the Native Americans and rename the school George Floyd University' gets filtered.
I spent some time working in college administration, and we used “barriers” to mean anything students were required to do.
For example, we used to put a hold on registration until students submitted residency and financial aid forms, met with an advisor, and took placement tests (or the SAT and ACT). Some students never completed all of the steps. To boost enrollment, we changed the rules to allow students to register without doing those things.
The world language requirement was another barrier (to graduation) so we eliminated it. Same with creating an easier “math literacy” course for students who struggled to pass college-level math.
The conversation was always about boosting our metrics (enrollment, retention, graduation). Once you’ve tried everything else (outreach, etc), it’s easy to see all requirements as barriers.
Sometimes it “helped” disadvantaged students and other times it really did not… for example, allowing students to register without aid and payment sorted out just resulted in bad debt.