Let's Get the College Board and ACT Out of Admissions

The University of California just became the largest higher education system to remove the SAT or ACT as a requirement for admission. Approximately 40 percent of U.S. four-year institutions do not require any college entrance exams already. The COVID-19 pandemic has uprooted the college admissions process, especially exams like the SAT, ACT and Advanced Placement. There is an opportunity to do something radical and make a significant difference toward engendering equity in college admissions. It is time to get the College Board and ACT out of college admissions.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its emerging consequences for all sectors of education have illuminated deeply entrenched inequities. College entrance exams like the SAT and academic competency exams like the AP, both of which are used widely to assess student achievement and evaluate college applicants, are two tools that research has shown over time to benefit wealthy families at the expense of working-class families and first-generation students. While the design of these exams may or may not be conclusively shown to be biased against these students, the use of them -- and subsequent abuse of them -- clearly has. By introducing these third-party tools for evaluating applicants, the College Board created a marketplace for gaming the system. Test preparation, testing strategies and test-driven curricula are all available to be purchased -- if you have the resources to do so.

Removing these flagship products of the College Board’s portfolio from college admissions would put greater emphasis on the one dimension of student achievement that can be most equitably measured -- student grades. Coincidentally, high school grades have the longest and strongest predictive value for reliably predicting postsecondary success. Exams like the SAT are stronger predictors of family background than college readiness. It seems simple: remove third-party testing organizations and engender greater equity.

One might argue that organizations like the College Board and ACT offer much more than just college entrance exams, and therefore removing them from college admissions completely is unrealistic, perhaps even undesirable. This might seem reasonable. The College Board also markets financial aid tools for both institutions and individuals, such as the CSS Profile and PowerFAIDES, which are meant to more accurately and efficiently assess and administer financial aid. The College Board also markets Accuplacer and CLEP, which are used to assess students’ readiness for college-level work and competence in particular subjects. Each of these, and a few other tools, ostensibly are designed to support colleges and universities in doing the work of getting the right students into the right colleges and then getting them into the right classes with the right level of affordability.

The products and services provided by the College Board and ACT are big business. Revenue to these organizations comes from individual families as well as member institutions. While all three organizations are nonprofit, their revenues and stranglehold on the college admissions process wield an outsize influence over it. Approximately 2.2 million students took the SAT in 2019. As long as these organizations have a fiduciary responsibility to their bottom line (e.g., revenues), they are not holding steadfast to education’s bottom line: students’ intellectual development, academic knowledge and the public good.

But why do American colleges and universities allow an outside, nongovernmental organization to leverage so much influence over those decisions? Certainly, American higher education, which was built over time to lead in the production of academic knowledge and entrusted to help build an informed citizenry for democracy, does not need to rely on such a market-oriented, even if mission-driven, enterprise. The College Board’s website states that it was “created to expand access to higher education,” yet its premier products and services have been shown over time to be easily co-opted and used in the marketplace of college admissions to further advantage wealthier families over poorer families. The College Board’s interventions into our higher education system perpetuate structural inequalities and eviscerate equal opportunity protection status and clauses in the college admissions process.

Another argument for keeping the College Board and ACT as an integral partner in the college admissions process is that some other entity, most likely a for-profit venture, would simply step in and take their place. At least these organizations are nonprofit and, in the case of the College Board, governed by its institutional members (i.e., representatives from the colleges and universities that pay for its products and services). While an opportunistic for-profit entity might be a likely inheritor, there is a third option -- a public good option.

Subsequent to the SAT, ACT and AP exams, many of the products from these organizations that institutions might find useful rely heavily on aggregated data made available from its member institutions and the students who apply and enroll in them. Why not empower the Institute for Education Sciences and/or the National Center for Education Statistics to build a data infrastructure to rival that of the College Board and ACT and promote a research and development effort from U.S. universities themselves to create open-source services and tools such as those marketed by the College Board? Surely this could lead toward a more egalitarian, more transparent and potentially more equitable suite of tools available to address the systemic inequities than that of our contemporary market-oriented condition of admissions. The point here is that we can empower other social institutions, including higher education, to do much of what these highly profitable nonprofit organizations offer, and perhaps we can do so in ways that build stronger equity in college opportunity, rather than exacerbating its inequalities.

Right now is the right time to take this bold step in reinventing college admissions. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a strange interest convergence across socioeconomic classes and communities. Wealthy families are as upset and outraged with the SAT, ACT and AP exams as historically marginalized communities have been for decades. And if not outraged, they are at least very seriously concerned about the fairness of using these exams in college admissions due to the inconsistencies of their administration in our current pandemic circumstances. Further, colleges and universities are already reinventing their admission and recruitment practices in light of the pandemic and the unpredictable circumstances for the fall term. Right now, institutions have an opportunity to eliminate the outsize influence of these organizations and work toward engendering greater postsecondary equity.

It’s time to get the College Board and ACT out of college admissions.