RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Columbia University announced in March of 2023 that it would become the latest Ivy League school to no longer require applicants to submit SAT/ACT scores for admission, the editors of National Review criticized a move that not only seemed designed explicitly to skirt the Supreme Court’s anticipated decisions banning racial discrimination in college admissions, but threatened the academic quality of the institution as well.

We have been emphatically confirmed in our position by the subsequent course of events. Harvard University announced last Thursday that it would be reversing its “standardized testing-optional” policy for applicants to the Class of 2029. This change in course — Harvard dropped the SAT/ACT requirement for applicants four years ago — comes on the heels of announcements by fellow Ivy League schools Dartmouth and Yale in February that they would be doing the same. We hail Harvard’s decision as one long overdue, and note that — given their influence on elite academic trends as a whole — it represents a setback for the continuing effort by left-wing academics to redirect higher education away from the pursuit of excellence and toward the pursuit of an ideological agenda.

The trend is unmistakable and the timing extremely telling: Unlike Columbia — which only acted last year — Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth all dropped their testing requirements in June of 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 crisis. For each school, the proffered logic was identical, and facially plausible: The chaos and national variation in Covid-19 lockdown protocols made it incredibly difficult (and in certain lockdown-happy states functionally impossible) for high-school students to sit for these tests. The problem was that the testing-optional policy remained in place long after Covid had faded away, which suggested that the pandemic was a pretextual excuse, and ideological considerations rather than epidemiological ones had driven it all along. (The fact that Columbia jumped onto this bandwagon years later and without any Covid rationale underlines the point rather demonstratively.)

So the sudden move by Dartmouth, Yale, and now Harvard — all in quick succession and all after having assessed their incoming classes of 2028 — to undo this policy reads unmistakably as an actual “panic button” moment. Four years of data on the abilities of classes admitted under the test-optional policy have now been collected by the elite schools that dropped standardized-testing requirements during the summer of 2020. The fact that all three schools acted simultaneously suggests that the results must be disastrously grim. (In the case of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and again tellingly, there are only two years of data — for they reverted back to requiring SAT/ACT scores in 2022, likely because it is far more difficult to ignore student unpreparedness in the STEM disciplines.) We have seen campuses riven by ideological battles over woke politics and free speech over the last half decade, but that in many ways disguises an even more alarming rot underneath: Elite schools that saddled themselves with underqualified students have now inevitably produced an entire micro-generation of underqualified (or at least suspect) graduates as well.