On February 14, the U.S. Department of Education issued a "Dear Colleague" letter to schools, colleges, and universities outlining what they claim are now impermissible diversity initiatives.
Among the things that the letter claims would be illegal would be eliminating standardized testing for admission in an effort to recruit a more diverse applicant pool.
Over 2100 campuses had test-optional admissions for Autumn 2025 and another 85 were test free. And there are years of deliberation and data-collection behind these decisions. The SAT and ACT don't predict much beyond what we might predict with high school GPA. Test scores instead strongly correlate with family income, whether because higher-income students repeat tests to get better scores and enroll in test prep tutoring, or simply because of the broader access to resources in and outside fo school.
The Century Foundation just published an excellent essay summarizing the evidence that standardized admissions testing favors the rich, as they argue that the "Dear Colleague" letter goes far beyond what the courts of required in minimizing race-based admissions. They discuss how colleges have been working hard to sustain race-neutral admissions after the Supreme Court eliminated race as a factor in admissions while still having the leeway to admit the very best, diverse student body. They document the persistent educational inequalities between high-income and low-income neighborhoods and argue that the "Dear Colleague" letter will, in the end, harm socio-economic diversity in college:
The Department of Education could come after policies that promote socioeconomic diversity just as much as they promote racial diversity. In a February 28 follow-up to the Dear Colleague Letter, OCR identified “statistics demonstrating a pattern of the policy or decision having a greater impact on members of a particular race” as one potential test for identifying violations. Almost any policy change that seeks to improve access for under-resourced communities could fail this test, not because of a college’s intention to skirt SFFA but because every college operates in the aftermath of history.
It's impossible to know if these decisions are intentional or grounded in ignorance. Either way, the odds against students from poor and working-class backgrounds are got worse. Those of us who care about them would do well to call our congressional representatives and those of us who work at colleges --or are alums – would do well to urge our administrators to do the same.
