The Ivy League has restored SAT and ACT admissions requirements that had been suspended during pandemic lockdowns, but a new report finds 90% of colleges and universities nationwide still do not require standardized test scores.
Fair Test, which has tracked admissions exam policies since 1985, found that only 161 of 2,247 colleges (7%) will require prospective students to submit a standardized test score for the 2026-2027 application cycle.
All eight Ivy League universities have revived or will restore the requirement by then: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
Other major schools that have reinstated admissions test requirements include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Georgetown, Auburn, Purdue, the California Institute of Technology, Vanderbilt, Miami, Georgia Tech, Ohio State, Notre Dame and the University of Texas.
Another 86% of colleges remain test-optional, meaning students may submit scores if they like, and 4% have test-free applications that do not consider scores. The remaining 3% lack clear policies.
Overall, Fair Test found that 11 campuses reinstated testing requirements for the upcoming admissions cycle, while 10 abolished them, resulting in a net gain of one school restoring the practice.
Several college admissions experts told The Washington Times that it is unlikely most schools will ever return to mandatory testing because waiving it boosted applications.
“Colleges are making their decisions on tests based on their own revenue needs,” said Gary Stocker, a former private school administrator who founded College Viability to evaluate campus finances.
He noted that colleges that require test scores tend to have lower acceptance rates, better-performing students, and higher four-year graduation rates than colleges that do not.
“We may like to think that colleges are selective in students they admit, but that only applies to a small number,” Mr. Stocker said. “The financial pressures on hundreds of colleges are so intense that any friction to getting a student enrolled is avoided.”
Research from the College Board, which administers the SAT, shows that scores predict success in four-year programs better than high school grades.
That makes admissions testing a key tool for elite schools to screen the sliver of applicants they accept, even as less-selective schools shun it.
“If a college finds that scores help predict which students are going to perform well and graduate, there’s a good argument for requiring them,” said Brian Safdari, president of College Planning Experts in Los Angeles. “If their data show that the test adds very little and requiring it discourages qualified students from applying, then staying test-optional may make more sense.”
Mr. Safdari noted that most colleges admit at least 60% of applicants, making them less concerned about weeding people out than a top school that accepts 4% or 5%.
Higher education has struggled for years with rising costs, increased campus closures, declining revenue projections and the Trump administration cutting funds to low-paying humanities programs.
Campus leaders met a “demographic cliff” this spring, as a decline in U.S. births since 2008 drove a 15% drop in the pool of potential college applicants. The nonprofit Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects that U.S. high school graduation numbers will fall steadily from a record 3.9 million students in 2025 to less than 3.4 million in 2041.
“A lot of state schools across the country are in a dire financial situation, so requiring test scores and enrolling even fewer students would be disastrous,” said Jake Williams, co-founder of Ivy Brothers in New York City, which helps families apply to top-ranked schools.
Most of the nation’s colleges went test-optional during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency because public health restrictions made standardized exams unavailable or unreliable for many students.
“Some institutions then retained the policy because it reduced barriers and increased application volume,” said Mr. Williams, a Princeton graduate. “The Ivies are reversing course because they now have several years of internal data showing that testing provides useful information about academic readiness.”
According to multiple reports, elite universities focused more on subjective essays and extracurricular activities during the test-optional craze, leading them to admit more students who struggled with basic academics.
Pros and cons
Racial justice advocates have argued that the SAT and ACT are culturally biased against low-income minorities and favor applicants from wealthy families with access to test prep resources.
They said those racial disparities deepened during the pandemic, requiring test-optional policies to bolster flagging minority applications.
Officials at the College Board found that removing testing requirements led colleges to use more subjective criteria.
They highlighted internal data showing that nearly 1.4 million students in the class of 2025 had SAT scores that “affirmed or exceeded their high school GPA,” including 8 in 10 minority and first-generation students.
“Other admissions factors, like grades, can unintentionally favor students with greater access to resources, particularly as student use of AI in coursework increases and grade inflation continues,” the College Board said in an emailed statement.
Dick Startz, an education economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said his public system’s 12 campuses have relied more on Advanced Placement test scores to sift applicants since going test-free in 2020.
“Wealthy school districts offer a much richer menu of AP tests than do low-income schools,” Mr. Startz said. “So it looks like elimination of standardized tests actually hurts low-income students.”
He noted that a growing number of faculty have petitioned the system’s regents to reconsider the system’s policy barring the use of test scores.
Carrie Jorgenson, a former admissions reader at the University of California’s Berkeley and Santa Cruz branches, said test-optional schools have little motivation to “add a barrier back” into the process.
“Test-optional policies grew applicant pools,” said Ms. Jorgenson, CEO of the college planning platform Early Bird. “More applicants means a lower acceptance rate, which boosts a school’s rankings and prestige, and it also means more application fee revenue.”
Future trends
Most college admissions experts predict that standardized tests will continue to play an important role in students’ competition for top programs, even as more schools downplay them.
Eric Kim, founder of the private test preparation company Matter, said he has not seen a drop in the number of students studying for the SAT or ACT since most colleges went test-optional.
“There is a lot of momentum and desire to continue testing from both the school and student sides,” Mr. Kim said. “Students who test well will always choose to submit a score if they can showcase their strengths.”
Several experts noted that many test-optional schools still quietly favor students who submit high scores for admissions and scholarships.
Laurie Kopp Weingarten, an educational consultant who co-founded One-Stop College Counseling in New Jersey, said testing remains an essential tool for sorting applicants.
“With significant grade inflation and many high schools no longer reporting class rank, colleges have fewer common academic data points than they once did,” Ms. Weingarten said. “There have also been concerns raised by faculty about whether incoming students are prepared for demanding college-level work, particularly in math, reading and writing.”
Others warned that ending SAT requirements to boost enrollment could backfire on colleges. They pointed to opinion surveys from recent years that show declining public trust in the value of a four-year degree.
“The more these institutions compromise their standards to hold on to the students they can enroll, the more they erode their public credibility, and the more they lock themselves into a downward spiral,” said Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars. “This is going to accelerate the extinction event that some say will close as many as 400 colleges in the next 10 years.”
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