Sadly, none of those things are universal 
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It’s my understanding that colleges cannot buy student names from CollegeBoard any more.
See this lawsuit:
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I know this, I wish other school districts could do this too. NYC public schools are overall quite low income, 72% of families qualify for free or reduced lunch across the board, or something like that, which I think is why the Title 1 cutoff here if 60%+ free or reduced lunch qualifying families (vs 40%+ elsewhere – weirdly, including Staten Island).
So how is DD getting all this mail/email? Is it bc she opted in when she took a test? She did the PSAT in November and will likely be a commended scholar (not likely NMS), and she just took the ACT in February (and is not taking it again). She’s a junior. Those are the only scores out there in the ether for her. Do they just send to everyone now?
I’m not sure.
@MITChris can you speak to CB’s Student Search program and if colleges are able to purchase any student level data? Looks like forbidden in NY, even if the student were to ‘opt-in?’
For entire states, what you describe (test on a school day AND during a dedicated day - thus no other classes with hw to prepare, for free, with in-school practice) doesn’t exist at all. In some, there may be a test day but it often isn’t announced much ahead of time and/or there is no in school practice. In-school testing is neither the most common practice nor universal.
There are new rules on student data depending on opt-ins, states, etc. It doesn’t mean “college search” has ended.
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Maybe schools should just use IQ tests instead 
maybe use all the money going into testing to provide them for students
I think they should allow something like open ended online MAP achievement testing maybe with a higher ceiling especially for math. Something that could be proctored at the school level on demand, should be funded, and something that wasn’t particularly time sensitive (low income students get accomodations much less than wealthier students). Why not any normed standardized achievement test that best demonstrates ability? (as an aside, I don’t work for MAP, just an example of a format that may be reasonably well suited to give another data point)
I just went through the last few common data sets for Yale. They somehow manage to get about half their student body full pay within a few percentage points. So I guess I personally am not convinced by any claims of wanting to find “diamonds in the rough” from any of these schools. They are super skilled at picking the wealthy. They are welcome to prove me wrong. I am not suprised admissions offices might just prefer fewer applications to screen and that may be enough motivation for overworked offices after the past few years. Especially for a school like UT-Austin trying to be at least somewhat fair and transparent to in state applicants with such a huge number of applicants.
Maybe just give all lower SES students a 100 pt bump on their SAT scores… 
I was being cynical.
That being said:
- there is a lot of proof that kids from low income families disproportionally applied TO. This is something that has come up repeatedly, and that has been demonstrated repeatedly. So my statement isn’t a stab in the dark or an unsupported assumption, but based on facts.
The actual facts support the claim that Harvard and other colleges that reinstate an SAT requirement will disproportionately reduce the number of applications from low income applicants.
These are the facts.
My cynicism was based on this and the claim, by Harvard, that this would increase the number of low income students (“diversity”), which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
There is simply no possible way that disproportionately reducing the number of any given group who apply to a college will increase the number of students of that group who will be accepted. Yet Harvard is making this pretty wild claim.
The only way that this could happen is if Harvard was discriminating against TO applicants, and don’t want to admit this.
- You misinterpreted what I wrote. I wrote that, with fewer low income applicants, they can accept the same number of low income applicants, but tout a higher acceptance rate for poor kids. If their “bucket” for “low income kids” is 5% of the accepted students (for example), if 7% of the applicant pool are poor, acceptance rates for poor kids will be disproportionately low. If, however, 4% of the applicant pool are poor, their acceptance rate will be disproportionally high.
So my cynical assumption is that they are not looking to lower the number of low income students who are accepted, they are looking to reduce the number of low income students who apply. My cynicism is saying that want to keep the percent of low income students as it is, but claim that they are making it easier for low income students to be accepted.
This article discussed who is applying TO, and how low income students apply TO. The article is an opinion piece, but the cite the statistics for applying TO.
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Of course there is.
Let’s run through a hypothetical. The assumptions in this hypothetical will be that Harvard accepts around 2000 students, and has an 80% yield to fill its 1600 person class.
For example, let’s suppose that in a test-optional environment Harvard has 10000 applicants flagged as low-income and with a high GPA, no test scores, and no way to demonstrate rigor (e.g. not an IB program, and few or none AP classes). There are certainly plenty of students to choose from, but less certainty that any particular admitted student will thrive at Harvard. How many students should Harvard choose from this pool? And how do you make that determination?
Alternatively, let’s suppose that in a test-required environment Harvard has 5000 low-income applicants because it drove half of them away. If only half of these 5000 students have sufficiently high test scores that Harvard is confident that they can handle the rigor, then Harvard has enough applicants that it could fill its entire class with low-income applicants if it chose to do so.
Also note that this filtering approach is not used just for college admissions, but for things like job interviews (e.g. by imposing GPA filters, or coding tests for CS grads). The goal is to reduce the number of applicants, but to have each applicant be of higher quality.
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And I’ll just note again that Dartmouth was suggesting its admit rate for high-1400s/low-SES students could go from 2% to 7.4% with those test scores available.
So, 7.4% of half the applicants (hypothetically) is still 1.85X the original rate.
But I would further emphasize this is actually a choice. Dartmouth could admit a lot more than 2% without tests. Dartmouth could admit a lot more than 7.4% with tests. And I am sure the same will be true for Harvard.
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I’m with hebegebe. Reducing the “Hail Mary Pass” applicants of any demographic (Internationals, FGLI, rural HS’s) is going to make it easier to admit- with a degree of confidence- kids from those segments who can do the work and take full advantage of what the institution has to offer. There are lots of different Hail Mary applicants- but the most obvious chunk are the TO kids who think “why not me?”
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We are in contact with CB and are still working to use what we can. I’m not in the weeds here, but my understanding is that Search is unavailable for anyone taking the Digital SAT and limited in states for the paper tests. I am like 80% on this though.
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I haven’t heard the podcast, but I’d expect the students who are admitted is more relevant than the students who are “stab in the dark” first pass rejected. The matriculating students do show a significant increase in international students, as well as an increase in markers associated with lower SES. A comparison of how the Yale published class profile changed between test required 2019-20 to test optional 2023-24 is below.
Yale Class Profile: 2019-20 → 2023-24
FA Recipient: 53% → 55%
Pell: 20% → 22%
First Gen: 17% → 21%
Legacy: 12% → 11%
Male: 50% → 48% (test optional generally favors women)
(Mixed race is double counted, so adds up to >100%)
White: 49% → 42%
Asian: 26% → 30%
Hispanic: 15% → 18%
Black: 12% → 14%
International: 9.5% → 12%
Mixed Race; 19% → 23%
1,114 HSs Represented → 1,224 HSs represented
Public HS: 63% → 63%
Private Day HS: 23% → 20%
Boarding HS: 6% → 10%
Countries Represented: 57 → 68 (new countries include Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Chile, Cote D’Ivoire, Croatia, Domincan Republic, El Salvador, …)
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Are you sure? Then why does my junior receive emails/postcards from questbridge and questbridge partner schools? My older one (HS Class of '20. MIT '24) never received questbridge mailings. We live in a diverse zip code, attend public school.
I thought need blind meant that low income wouldn’t be used either positively or negatively in admissions? Maybe I don’t understand what need blind means.
As part of the SFFA lawsuit, Harvard revealed that it flags applicants as likely being low-income based the admission officers read of the application, not based upon the student applying for financial aid. I would expect its peers to do the same.
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Some colleges practice a form of positive need aware, where lower income is a positive rather than a negative or “all things being equal” (because by definition for s.o FGLI things weren’t equal with the typical Ivy+/NESCAC applicant).
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The colleges and universities wouldn’t have been able to send them mail on account of being at a Title 1 school. Schools don’t provide home mailing addresses. That was test scores.
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