Test-Only Admissions Would Make Colleges More White, More Wealthy

In the wake of the sweeping college admissions scandal that sparked a national conversation about inequality in higher education, researchers at Georgetown University wanted to know what enrollment at the country's top colleges and universities would look like if students were admitted based solely on their SAT scores.

The answer: more wealthy and a lot more white.

A test-only admissions policy would raise the median SAT score at the top 200 colleges in the country from 1250 to 1320, and more than half of the students currently enrolled would be replaced.

The experiment showed that a test-only admissions policy would increase the share of white students at top colleges from 66% to 75%, and the combined share of black and Latino students would decrease from 19% to 11%. The share of Asian students would fall slightly, from 11% to 10%.

While 60 percent of incoming freshmen at selective colleges already hail from the top quartile of family socioeconomic status, the share of those students would increase to 63 percent if students were admitted based on standardized test scores alone.

"In the wake of the college admissions scandal, our thought experiment tested whether removing legacy and social capital from the admissions equation would have a more equitable outcome," says Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce and the report's lead author. "But a test-only admissions policy would only further privilege in the higher education system."

Selective colleges and universities have long used a holistic admissions process by taking into account things like high school grades, essays, letters of recommendation, activities, athletic ability and ability to pay tuition – in addition to test scores.

But many higher education policy experts agree that those admission practices give the upper hand to students who are already advantaged. Indeed, income inequality in education has a long history, in large part because so much of K-12 budgets are dependent on local property taxes, meaning wealthier communities with higher tax bases automatically have more money to pay for things like better teachers, AP courses and college counselors – all of which provide a leg up in the college admissions process.

Combine that with families who can also afford coaching for the SAT and ACT, additional counselors who go over college essays with a fine-tooth comb and costs for recreational sports, music lessons and other extracurriculars, and admission to the most elite colleges is assumed by many lower-income families to be out of reach.

That narrative has been amplified by the recent college admission scandal, and the report itself comes in the wake of the College Board, the organization that administers the SAT, rolling out a new diversity score that aims to capture the socioeconomic profile of every student. The report also comes as a current legal battle over Harvard University's race-based admissions preference policies ensues.

"If we tested students, then lined 'em up and let 'em in, America's top colleges would become less racially diverse on the basis of small differences in test scores," Jeff Strohl, director of research at the center and co-author of the report, says.

Carnevale and Strohl underscored that despite the perception that black and Latino students benefit from affirmative action admission policies, in reality, they are not admitted in significant numbers with lower scores. As the experiment showed, 27% of enrolled students whose SAT score is lower than 1250 are black or Latino and 35% are affluent and white.

An SAT-only admissions policy is not the solution, they argue, since research shows that standardized tests are not a strong enough predictor of success in college to warrant them being used alone. As the experiment found, only using standardized tests for admissions would create student bodies that are less racially diverse and slightly more affluent but not much more likely to succeed in college.

"The question of how heavily to weigh standardized test scores in admissions decisions is about more than fairness in admissions," Carnevale and Strohl write in the report. "At its heart, it's a question about the goals of our higher education system and what we do when those goals are in tension."