Call me cynical, but I believe that it’s all about branding. One of the ways that the magazines that are pandering the wealthy families who attend Harvard and other Ivies is to publish lists of “The Smartest Colleges”. They are all based on the average or median SAT scores of those colleges.
Without SAT scores, how will be able to participate in these games?
To be honest, while the math SATs are challenging to most students, and, again, income strongly affects that, for a student who wants to attend Caltech it’s basic. I still think that it’s a problem. Not because low income students will score low - students who want to attend Caltech should be the sort of students who can learn SAT-level math on their own at the library. The problem I see is that students who are not at that level, but have wealth, can make the same scores without the actual math talents that Caltech wants.
On the other hand, caltech has had issues with recruiting low income students. In the original Chetty article, they had 69% from the top 20%, and 3% from the top 1%, but only 2.9% from the bottom 20%. That was when they required the SATs.
So it doesn’t really look like they actually care about economic diversity. The SAT is back because it is way to let the CB quickly cull students who don’t have the most basic math required for engineering.
However, since a 790 or so on math is the basic requirement, they are still accepting mostly by the same exact factors that people consider more biased than SATs - ECs and LoRs.
That is the exact same thing that will happen with Harvard, except worse. At least Caltech requires that level of math to be able to start, but Harvard doesn’t. By using the SATs as a culling device, they will make sure that the applicants who pass the first cull are already mostly wealthy.
Then the other factors which benefit the wealthiest applicants will kick in. As the more recent Chetty article has shown, even when controlling for tests scores, the wealthiest are getting huge boosts.
So I’m sorry, but reinstating the SATs will not change the importance of the rest of the skewed factors. It will merely ,end a veneer of fake egalitarianism on it.
The percent or the wealthiest people among Harvard’s students hasn’t really budged. The top percentiles by income and wealth are 45% of the students, same as when Chetty wrote his first article. Going TO didn’t change that, and reinstating the SAT requirement won’t change that either.
Reinstating the SAT requirement will not make it more likely that a poor applicant will be accepted. To be perfectly honest, I don’t believe that going TO will change the number who were accepted either.
To take my cynicism a step further - Harvard and Yale and others reinstated the SATs to reduce the number of poor applicants. Fewer low income students will apply, so Harvard and their ilk will actually be able to accept fewer poor applicants while seeming to have more lenient requirements for low income applicants.