Change the Game and the Name of 'College Admissions'

Most high school seniors and their parents currently have college at the top of mind. Early application deadlines are approaching, and students are frantically writing their application essays.

But it’s not just families who are focused on getting in. Perhaps it even seems natural that everyone from college admissions officers to the media focuses on who gets in, too. But this focus on who gets to sit behind the wheel of a given car has caused everyone to neglect asking who gets to their destination safely and on time. While it should be the job of colleges to focus on outcomes, not just access, colleges have dropped the ball – and few have noticed.

How do we know that colleges prioritize access over outcomes? Long after the Covid lockdowns that kept students from taking standardized tests have ended, most colleges are still test-optional. Test-optional colleges choose to make their admissions decisions with less information about whether students are academically prepared to succeed at the college. According to the latest research, SAT and ACT scores are 290% more predictive of a student’s success at an Ivy or Ivy-Plus college than high school grades. Students whose test scores better match the rigor of that college get higher GPAs and are not only more likely to graduate but to do so in less time (which decreases the debt they graduate with). More specifically, if they are a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) major, they are also much more likely to actually graduate as a STEM major, instead of switching into an easier major. This ability to persist as a STEM major is not trivial: on average, students who graduate with a degree in STEM are more likely to be employed and have salaries about 50% higher than those who graduate without a degree in STEM. 

In the name of access and diversity, colleges are setting students up to fail. A 2013 study of the SAT scores of University of California (UC) students found that almost no students with low SAT scores were able to remain as STEM majors. Specifically, 0.6% of underrepresented minority students with SAT scores in the bottom 25th percentile who started as STEM majors at Berkeley graduated as STEM majors within four years. That’s not a typo. In other words, 99.4% did not do so. In contrast, those with high SAT scores did dramatically better: minority students in that same cohort who had top 25th percentile scores graduated at a nearly 4000% higher rate.