“Will more colleges go back to the SAT? Almost certainly.”

In 2011, long before the pandemic forced universities to do so by necessity, Jon Boeckenstedt and his peers at DePaul University were among the first at a large institution to go test-optional for the college admissions process.

It all began when a colleague came to him with an admissions folder for a student who had recently been denied, though her high school counselor urged the university to admit her. She was doing well at her in an International Baccalaureate program. She “fit the profile,” Boeckenstedt recalled his colleague told him at the time. 

“She said ‘Well, we have a long history with IB programs in the city of Chicago, where the students have abysmal test scores and they graduate at a higher rate than students from other schools, or even good feeder schools.’”

It was true — research showed students who tested very poorly on standardized tests but went to rigorous high schools thrived once they got to college.

“It sort of made the first impression on me that not just individual students — because there's always those anomalies — but collectively, students who have really solid academic preparation … were actually very well prepared despite those test scores,” he told me. 

After some research and piloting, DePaul made the decision to switch to test-optional admission in 2011.

Today, Boeckenstedt is vice provost of enrollment management at Oregon State University. He’s tired of talking about this. 

“I would say in the past 15 years, I get requests for someone twice a week to talk about testing,” he said.

If you’re even remotely tuned in to higher ed news, then you’ve likely seen the headlines announcing several colleges mulling the return of standardized testing requirements. 

Last week, our own Sneha Dey of the Texas Tribune wrote of The University of Texas at Austin bringing back its testing requirement. In North Carolina, WUNC’s Brianna Atkinson covered a new policy the state is considering for testing requirements at public universities. Ivy League schools are generating numerous headlines themselves — Brown, Dartmouth and Yale each recently announced they would be reinstituting testing requirements. 

“Will more colleges go back to the SAT? Almost certainly,” Boeckenstedt said.

With this in mind, I have to wonder: If you’re a high schooler preparing to apply to college, should you take the SAT or ACT as a fail-safe? It depends on where you want to go, geographically speaking, Boeckendstedt said.

“You know, there are some states where it's probably going to be mandated pretty soon, they tend to be red states, they tend to be institutions that are more conservative in nature,” he said. 

“Everything west of the Mississippi,” aside now from UT, is test-blind or test-optional for bigger public universities, he said. 

“If you're thinking of institutions east of the Mississippi, probably the answer is yes. If you're thinking about public institutions in California, exclusively, don't waste your time.”

Elsewhere on Open Campus

In Mississippi, Molly Minta details a college financial aid program that was designed to exclude the lowest-income students and has helped children of millionaires pay tuition.

Claire Rafford of Mirror Indy spent time with students and staff at Ivy Tech’s ELEVATE program, which helps formerly and currently incarcerated people enroll in classes, find jobs and get support with everything from mental health counseling to financial assistance.

At the University of Chicago-Illinois, Lisa Kurian Philip of WBEZ wrote about the struggle for student access to mental health care as the school grows but resources devoted to that kind of support have not.

“UIC for a while was continuing to expand and accept more and more students, which I think is great on one hand. But the amount of resources was not expanding with the rate of the students that we were accepting.”

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