| The political atmosphere following George Floyd and "defund the police", as there was a then somewhat fringe position that standardized testing was racist (yet low income and marginalized Asian communities like Vietnamese and Cambodians and immigrant African communities being able to match or exceed performance of White Californians was ignored) came to the fore, which lead to the politicially easy and popular option of making standardized testing optional. This lead to a populist overcorrection in California to increase UC admissions from Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) schools which tended to skew low income and non-white/non-Asian (though plenty of Asians fall under LCFF schools as plenty of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Cambodian Californians can attest). Ideally, UC and CSU admissions need to be restricted (90th-100th percentile at a UC, 70th-100th percentile at CSU, and everyone else at a CC) in order to push students who need some remedial learning to be provided it at Community Colleges - just like the Warren Plan said when the 3 tiered California Model of Education was developed - but community colleges are perceived as being "lower tier" and breaking barriers is viewed as a quick populist win. Ironically, it wasn't even mainstream Latiné or African American politicans in California that were driving this policy - it was progressive leaning organizations whose membership are overwhelmingly upper middle class White and Asian Americans who attended Ivies, top UCs, and elite B10s. Expanding funding and the quality of services provided at the K-12 level would have helped solve the issue in a 5-10 year timeframe, but the populist overreaction now puts actually smart policies like LCFF at risk of being cut due to a populist counter-reaction. That said, I find it telling that the AEI also doesn't mention that Harvard also doubled down on legacy admissions following the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action - and admissions for all races other than White dropped at Harvard. That in itself is flagrant hypocrisy in the face of meritocracy. Furthermore, if we are seeing students who need additional courses to remediate educational issues, I don't necessarily see an issue around offering such academic services in any program - be it Harvard or your local state college. And at least at Harvard, remedial math and English classes had been offered in the 1990s and 2000s. Both progressive coded policies like "equity" via reduced standards and conservative coded polices like dropping affirmative action hurt meritocracy. To someone like me, it looks like a culture war between White and Black Americans, and those of us who are Indigenous, Asian, or Latiné Americans are catching strays. |
This is not it at all. The removal of SAT / ACT requirements has more to do about university pipelines and budgets, rather than social justice.
As with any metric, when you introduce it, people start optimizing for the metric rather than for what it's intended to measure. SAT and ACT scores had become so important, yet they are not actually a good indicator for what they're designed to measure (academic aptitude). They are also gamed, and people cheat. When colleges put too much emphasis on these metrics, it causes high schools to start aligning to teach them, rather than teaching broad skills colleges actually prefer.
What you attribute to social justice and the murder of George Floyd was really more of a pipeline problem caused by COVID. As someone who does undergraduate and graduate admissions, I can tell you the proximal cause of us dropping our standardized test requirement was that the many very good applicants to our school couldn't get tested, because it had been suspended. So we had a choice: don't admit a full class of students or drop the requirement. We dropped the requirement. It wasn't about social justice, or equality, or DEI, or whatever else you want to attribute it to. Rather, it was dropped because we needed students, and our applicants didn't have test scores.
That the requirement hasn't come back since is a matter of inertia; deciding to drop a requirement because it is impacting the short-term student pipeline is a decision the administration makes because they're losing money now. Bringing it back has to be justified by the lower ranks who are impacted by admitting unprepared students. Admin doesn't feel that pain. It's a much harder and longer process to show the lack of the standard is harming the university in the long term. Matters of social justice one way or another are not very persuasive to bean counters.