The author is right, there isn't some big mystery, but his conclusion is wrong.
The original reason colleges went test optional is that the SAT is a point of friction for some applicants and therefore reduces the number of applicants a college/university might receive. This reduces the total pool of applicants thereby increasing the acceptance rate and, if a college is really hurting for applicants, potentially reduces total enrollments. Most colleges are incredibly tuition dependent. They are not in the business of rejecting anyone that they think could be successful at their institution.
The SAT saw this trend and decided they needed to respond by eliminating analogies and adding a writing section. This was in 2005. This only increased the trend because now colleges couldn't even compare SAT scores from one year to the next, which was really the only real benefit colleges saw in the SAT, because as it turns out, the SAT was a pretty bad predictor of success beyond freshman year.
So really colleges just stopped seeing the value in the test coupled with it serving as just another barrier for students when most colleges were trying remove barriers to increase the number of applicants.
Because total college enrollment in the US has stalled and is expected to decline. In addition, the discount rate is at an all time high. These two factors have led to the market being squeezed. There are less students to go around and colleges have a lot of facilities and staff to maintain.
And by now, do you mean over the last 25 years? Colleges have been going test optional for decades.
> As I hope you can tell by now, I think the anti-testing people are wrong. That said, I do think the anti-anti-testing people are more worried than they ought to be. I hear from certain quarters that the end of standardized testing will lead to a catastrophic collapse of meritocratic standards or make it impossible for smart kids from modest backgrounds to distinguish themselves.
> The people raising those concerns are, I think, taking the situation too literally. The worriers are looking at the current admissions system and then imagining the consequences of kicking out the standardized test leg of the stool. And it’s completely true that if you did that, you’d get a class that’s skewed more toward privilege and less toward intelligence. But I think that misunderstands the situation. Elite schools don’t design an admission system behind a veil of ignorance and then see what happens. They know what kind of class they want and they reverse-engineer admissions criteria to deliver that result. This reverse-engineering process places a thumb on the scale against Asian applicants from major metropolitan areas. But it’s embarrassing (and potentially illegal) to admit that this is happening, and the standardized tests make it a little too clear what’s going on.
> Schools are moving to phase out the tests not because they want to admit a different group of people, but because they are anticipating a Supreme Court ruling that will try to make them change who they admit, and they don’t want to do that.
> The idea is that without standardized test requirements, it will be harder for anyone to prove that discrimination is happening and schools can keep admitting the same people they are admitting now. Because the tests are a useful tool, doing without them will make admissions work a little bit more labor-intensive. But Harvard has plenty of money and can easily afford to hire more admissions officers to scrutinize applications that lack a convenient summary test score.
The original reason colleges went test optional is that the SAT is a point of friction for some applicants and therefore reduces the number of applicants a college/university might receive. This reduces the total pool of applicants thereby increasing the acceptance rate and, if a college is really hurting for applicants, potentially reduces total enrollments. Most colleges are incredibly tuition dependent. They are not in the business of rejecting anyone that they think could be successful at their institution.
The SAT saw this trend and decided they needed to respond by eliminating analogies and adding a writing section. This was in 2005. This only increased the trend because now colleges couldn't even compare SAT scores from one year to the next, which was really the only real benefit colleges saw in the SAT, because as it turns out, the SAT was a pretty bad predictor of success beyond freshman year.
So really colleges just stopped seeing the value in the test coupled with it serving as just another barrier for students when most colleges were trying remove barriers to increase the number of applicants.
There's no big mystery--it is about revenue.