For every less competitive kid that gets into a school they wouldn’t have before test optional, a more competitive kid is shut out. At the private school where I teach, students aren’t getting into the types of schools they used to and it’s fueling this drive to put in more and more applications. When your valedictorian is ending up at an undesirable school, people notice.
When I tell my friends we’ve already spent 250k on college, and my kids made economical choices, they’re blown away. In California we’re paying over 100k for the most economical state schools. My older son was not as competitive and went to WUE school, which we were grateful for, but that was another 30k a year.