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All on one platform. To start your free 14 day trial, go to Monday Dotcom. OK, AURIN, 17 years old, wants to be a dentist, which I didn't even know there was a thing anybody wants in high school, but here's what I know. Apparently, there are armies of teenagers who want to put on a white coat and enlist in the international war between human beings and black.

I was in Saturday Academy, which is NYU is like dentistry program for like high schoolers. It was virtual.

What was the best thing about that? What they did? What was your favorite part of it? Airport was filling cavities, essentially are like a fake tooth model thing. Like the K on the T thing, I like scrape it off, they say it was like I was an actual dentist and like the tools, it was fine. It was so much fun.

So I spring junior year, I started to get serious with her college applications. She's a good student, great GPA, but she had a problem.

Her dream colleges, Cornell, Columbia, NYU, they all wanted SAT scores, two or three hundred points higher than our SAT scores, then ranked this crazy break all over the country, as it were, being canceled because of coronavirus. There's no safe way to fill a room with high school kids. Take the test. Colleges started to change their admissions requirements.

So I heard that like a lot of schools were going test optional, especially on Tic-Tac. That's where I would see everything like college updates, like test optional updates, test optional means the SAT test is optional. You can apply without submitting SAT scores or ACT scores, for that matter, for mainstream schools where to go test optional, it would magically vaporize the only obstacle standing between her and them and a life drilling into the memories of her fellow citizens. But most of the only schools to go test optional seem to be out west, she said all three of her top picks were in New York every day should go online to check the lists of test optional schools.

And I would keep refreshing, keep looking to see every single day, skip any new schools were added. And where they changing every day? Yeah, like two, three schools were added every single day. And then I remember it was spring break because I dedicated my whole spring break to studying for eight years, and then I remember I got the notification a little like fell from like Gmail from Columbia University because I signed up for their mailing list. And it was like, oh, yeah, we're going test optional.

And I said, I think I like I was studying. I had that keep open. So I threw it across my bed. I wrote my mom was the first person I called, so I ran to her. I was like, I don't think I think you and stuff. I was like, I gave her a hug. We like Jones. And then I called my friend and I started screaming on the phone. We sort of like dancing. I'm like, it's like you got hit by lightning or something, but in a good way.

Yeah. I thought that maybe now without the FCC, I kind of have a chance to have a shot, you know, like shoot for the stars. Like, this is my.

She's been planning to apply to 10 or 11 colleges now, she upped the number to 17 and all across the country, there are lots of kids doing that.

But the pandemic has upended college admissions in so many ways that a huge swath of the country's high school seniors are having the opposite experience from Lawrence.

They're falling through the cracks, ghosting of counselors who can't just grab them in the hallway or pull them from class this year, having tried everything else.

In response a few weeks ago in Fort Worth, Texas, high school counselor Valerie Gonzalez and a couple of the counselors and supervisors hit the streets with a list of students addresses to try to catch them at their homes.

We're pretty nervous, too. We've never done anything like this before.

So the Valley's 25 first in her family to go to a four year college placed as a counselor in this high school by a nonprofit called College Advising Corps to encourage kids should be the first in their families.

She's pretty hardcore about it.

Yeah, I've I've actually definitely cried with students before when I kind of told them, why are you doing this to yourself? Like you have an opportunity, especially even just to go to community college. Please do something to better your life.

She throws itself into a job with such energetic thoroughness that we're going door to door. This morning she made little goodie bags to give out with face masks and stickers that you made by hand.

She and another counselor check on drastic walk up to her door house. Hi. Hi.

So we're from the go center, Gonzalez. And basically we are just coming around. We're going to give you this and invite you to our event. And basically, like, do you need any help, like applying to college or anything or like, do you know what to do after you graduate?

You might take a year off, you might take a year, might take a year off is not the answer Valerie is looking for, but she's gotten a lot of it since the pandemic at high school. She's at Western Hills senior class last year. At this point in the year, 70 percent of them applied to colleges in Texas this year, senior class, just 45 percent. Yeah, many of my kids either don't want to go to college because they're already working or can help their families during the pandemic or they just want to go to community college.

And you're like, well, y you know, you have a three point eight GPA. You could go to a lot of four year universities on scholarship. Like why, you know, why are you setting your sights low? And most of them are like, well, I want to stay close to home. Or my mom is really concerned about covid and she doesn't want me to go anywhere. And the other thing too, is the cost. Some of my students are like, why am I going to go to college?

Why am I going to pay fifty thousand dollars if my classes are going to be virtual and I'm not even going to get to go to class with my professors, it's going to all going to be online. Let me take you on one last stop on this mini college tour in the scramble gear, colleges are seeing things they've never seen before. Lots of schools are not getting anywhere near the number of applications that they're used to, especially less selective schools because of students like Valorise.

Some schools are down 15, 20 percent and looking to take massive financial hits because of it. Meanwhile, schools you might think of as having brand recognition and big flagship state schools, they're seeing a surge in applications. Rain's first choice schools, for example, and new applications are up 20 percent. Cornell's up thirty one percent. Columbia is up 51 percent, driven probably by students like Warren who are hoping that this is their year with no SATs blocking the way.

But even schools with great numbers aren't feeling great. John Back instead runs undergrad admissions for Oregon State, which has thirty four percent more applications this year than last year. He writes about higher education and talks to admissions officers around the country.

We're all sort of confused and befuddled, and a few of us are frankly terrified by what these numbers mean, terrified because usually when they say yes to a bunch of applicants, they can predict how many of them are going to actually choose to enroll at their school.

But this year, the normal indicators they would use for that are gone.

For instance, did the student make a campus visit, which means there would be more likely to enroll in the fall? Well, those didn't happen this year. They had a higher SAT score, and that would mean more schools want those students and they would be less likely to enroll at Oregon State. Of course, they don't have SAT scores.

And so as a result, a market that offers a place in his first year cost thousands of kids.

We might have way too many students enroll in the fall. And then the residence halls are crowded and we don't have sufficient classroom space and we just don't know how to handle the crush.

On the other hand, to a few students enroll, which is again, again, scary. We're used to thinking of application increases as good things, and this year we just don't know what they mean. But today on a program, college admissions in this pandemic year, so much is different this year, so much is unknown. And today on our program, we've chosen to focus on one very specific part of the picture, one of the most interesting things that got thrown into the air this year, and that is the Satie's.

For years there have been people saying that they're unfair, schools should not require them. And now, finally, like this vast national science experiment, most colleges have stopped requiring them. What's that look like? What actually change?

Who gets into more selective schools have crossed some line. And we're not going back to Chicago. It's this American Life. I'm IRA Glass. Stay with us.

So for months now, I've been looking into what's happening with college admissions since the pandemic with reporter Paul Tof, who's been on our show many times, who writes about education.

And in fact, his most recent book is on the admissions process and the students that that system is not working for.

Hey there, Paul Herher Sarposa.

One of the things you point out in your book is that this period when kids apply to college is this unusual moment. Probably the biggest moment in kids lives in this country when they get a real chance at social mobility.

Yeah, going to college pays off in all kinds of ways. You're more likely to make more money, more likely to get married, more likely to live longer to say you're happy. But it also makes a big difference where you go to college. This Harvard economist, Raj Chetty, did a study and he found that for students who go to the most selective schools, the Ivy League schools and schools like it have a one in five chance of making it into the top one percent of earners as an adult.

If you go to a slightly less selective school, you have a one in 11 chance of making it into the top one percent. Go to community college. It's a one in 300 chance. Don't go to college at all, a one in a thousand chance. So this moment in high school, when kids are sorted into more and less selective institutions, it matters a lot. And that brings us to the subject of our show today, the Satie's, they have been a big part of this story for a long time.

And for the last few decades, there's been this debate about whether colleges should require the SATs and one school after another is decided not to have gone test optional, notably in 2018, the University of Chicago, one of the most rigorous and selective schools in the country, did it. And last spring, the biggest public system in the country, the University of California, with over 200, 25000 undergrads on nine campuses, did away with the SAT at the time that the pandemic hit, half of the country's four year colleges were test optional.

But still, the overwhelming majority of the country's most selective schools, including the Ivy League, were not test optional. They still required the SAT and there was a real question, should they do it? And then with the pandemic, they did. Another 600 schools suddenly did not require the SAT coding, pretty much all the most selective schools. And we're going to look in today show at what that has meant, especially for the kind of students who have been kept from those schools by the SATs in the past.

And we're going to look at what's likely to happen with the SAT after the pandemic. But but just to start here at the beginning, we should explain for anybody who hasn't followed this, why schools are questioning the SAT in the first place. And Paul, you're going to take this part of the story. Also, you're getting a couple of minutes. If you want to understand why people are questioning the SAT these days, you should meet Daniela. She's one of those kids who seems destined for college.

Her family immigrated to Riverside, California, from Mexico when she was eight.

She started third grade. They're not speaking a word of English. And by the time she got to high school, she was taking honors classes, getting amazing grades, even though she was also working 20 hours a week cleaning houses and standing on street corners, flipping signs.

There was a group of five students at the top of the class, and Danielle was always up there in that group for most of high school, in fact, she was number one.

The only be I ever got in class was my senior year in my Spanish class. I didn't really care too much about it just because I already knew Spanish.

So it wasn't like my believe it Spanish where you got your I know you're going to get a Spanish.

I was really good at it, but I never showed up. But at the end of the day, like the participation was okay with me, I was destroyed. I cried.

I was like, no, my only B she wanted to go to an Ivy League college or one of the elite University of California schools like Berkeley or UCLA and be a doctor.

And then she took the SAT. No, yeah, definitely the SATs.

He was kind of like humbling. I was like, you know, this all these years I grew up thinking I was kind of like genius because everybody was telling me. And then the S.A.T. was like, no, you're not.

This was during the years when the SAT wasn't using the six hundred point scale that most people would know. But if you translated her score to today's scores, it would be about eleven eighty. That's a fine score. Better than about 70 percent of the students who take the test. But it's not the kind of score that straight-A students usually get, and it isn't the kind of score that will get you into Ivy League schools or Berkeley or UCLA. The five students at the top of Daniela's class were all super smart and ambitious.

They competed with each other, usually in a friendly way. She was No. One until that one bee. And then she slipped to number three. But when it came time for the SAT, Danielle, I noticed that three of those five, the ones who had more money, the ones whose parents were doctors, their families invested in the SAT, one kid's family paid for an expensive online course. One family hired a private tutor. Those students got top SAT scores.

Only one of the five, a boy got a score like hers. He did around the same score as me. And, you know, I saw him to be smarter than a lot of these people. But he came from like a lower class family, like a family that came from poverty as well. All the students that I saw do well came from money.

Danniella wasn't the first person to notice this relationship between family income and test scores. That's been documented for years. Better off kids do better on the SAT for all kinds of reasons, not just the private tutors and the 600 page study guides. They're also more likely to live in better neighborhoods. So they go to better schools.

All of the advantages that go along with growing up with money feed into that test score. Still, for Danniella, it was frustrating.

I'm also wondering, like, was there a way that that that experience of getting the score that you did, did it sort of change your feeling about yourself as a student? Definitely, I think it's. It was disheartening just because, you know, like it was kind of like where I first questioned whether I was at their same level type of thing, yeah, definitely made me question a lot of my qualities or skills or. Yeah. Did you feel like you were as smart as them?

I did. I felt like in class I performed just as well as them. But that test was saying otherwise, you know, so when I got that test results, I was kind of questioning whether I was.

That's so interesting. Sounds like there's a side of you that was like, oh, no, I'm definitely as smart as them. But there was maybe another side of you that was like, well, wait, maybe this is like this is the real measure of who's smart and who's not. Like, was your brain sort of going back and forth between those two ideas?

Yes, definitely. That's exactly what was happening. You know, one side was like, no, I've seen these these people how they've analyzed an essay. I've seen how they've solved that problem. I know that like I wrote out this research paper better than them, you know, like I have seen them perform and I have seen how my skills compare to them.

And then but at the same time, I would think, you know, maybe this test is actually testing who's smarter. And this whole time I've been like passing by on a fluke, you know, on luck.

Do you think there was something about like the way that the test was presented that made it seem like, well, maybe this is the real measure of who's smart and who's not?

Yeah, just the fact that this is while all these institutions are basing off entrance, you know, if you do good, you deserve to go to college. If you don't, then it's not, you know. So then I'm here questioning like, should I even go to college? Like, am I even built for college? I, I don't even know if I'll do good in college because I clearly can't do good in this test, you know.

So Yeah.

Is that it's presented like if you don't do go you're not going to do well in college. It's not surprising that Danielle had that thought for years. That's how the SAT was sold as an objective measure of intelligence, a scientific indicator of who would succeed in college, more accurate than the grades that kids get in high school. There's a lot of research, though, including studies from the College Board, the nonprofit organization that administers the SAT, that shows that this isn't quite true.

Let me tell you the stuff that researchers mostly agree on first, that high school grades are slightly better than SAT scores at predicting how well students will do in their first year in college, whether they'll graduate on time.

If you can only have one number to judge a student, high school grades are your best bet.

Second, that if you look at the combination of a student's high school GPA and their SAT score, then you can predict their college performance slightly better than you can with just their high school grades alone.

What they don't agree on is whether that extra bit of predictive power you get with the SAT is worth the cost, because there's a third thing that everyone agrees on, and that is that SAT and ACT scores heavily favor rich kids, much more so than high school grades. So if you use standardized tests in admissions, you're probably going to reject a lot of perfectly good students who could succeed at your institution. And the students you're rejecting are more likely to be low income and first generation and non-white.

The SAT is like a doctor's test that gives you a lot of false negatives and students who are already underrepresented on campuses are more likely to be kept out of college by one of those false negatives. In Danielle's case, when she saw her score, she decided it would be hopeless to apply to all her first high schools, Harvard, the other Ivy Berkeley. She applied to computer science at UCLA, whose average SAT was 300 points higher than hers and didn't get in.

As for the three affluent students in the top five, the ones with the SAT tutors and courses, they were accepted to Berkeley, Penn and Harvard, the boy who came from the same background as Danielle. I went to Riverside Community College and Danielle, I wound up at the University of California at said the newest and least selective U.S. school.

And Danielle says that seems like what the SAT is intended to do.

It's meant to weed out. It's meant to gatekeeper, in my opinion.

And do you think of it as like it's just sort of accidentally keeping people out or you feel like it's designed to keep keep people like you out of those colleges?

Hmmm, I don't think it's accidental because I think that by now the test has been around long enough to whether they could see patterns, you know, so I feel like maybe at first it was accidental. But now if they are seeing consistent, consistent patterns of students with certain socioeconomic backgrounds or ethnic backgrounds are doing not as good as others, then it has to be intentional. The people who run the SAT and the ACT, they would definitely say that it's not intentional, that certain groups do poorly on standardized tests because they face other disadvantages that hold back their academic progress.

But it's certainly true that for decades now, these tests have kept excellent students like Danniella out of the best schools.

Until just maybe this year, when the majority of colleges for the very first time went test optional. The question is, did that help our students like Danielle and now going to actually get into these more selective schools? The answer is complicated. And I was going to pick up this part of the story. Thanks, Paul. OK, so what's going to happen to students like Danielle without the SAT blocking them from top schools will give you a sense of that.

One of those selective name brand schools that saw an increase in applications this year thanks to test optional Georgia Tech until this year, use the SATs as one of the things that I've looked at in screening applicants than they went test optional because of the pandemic and got 11 percent more applications and they got a more diverse application pool. Black students up 20 percent, students whose parents who didn't go to college, first generation students up 20 percent. This year, by the way, is typical.

Even in pandemic times when a school goes test optional, more kids think maybe I can get in and they apply. And the diversity of the applicants also increases the big questions next. Of course, our number one with Georgia Tech offered those new applicant spots for the fall. And number two, will they accept a question? Number one, we actually now know the answer. They have sent out their offers to students. They did it about a week ago.

Rick Clark, the head of undergrad admissions, says they have admitted 28 percent more black students than last year, 20 percent more first generation students.

And I'm pleased with that. I mean, that is we have a relatively new president expanding access as a key part of his strategic plan.

Wait, so that was set as a goal like in the fall? Yes. And now so here you are with these numbers. So things are going great, right? That's great.

That's great. Yes, I know. We're very, very pleased. And now, of course, we're turning our attention to. All right, we have to convince these students to choose us. And that's where things get hard because of money.

Once they're here. Georgia Tech has a limited amount of financial aid to give out. On average, students only get half of what they need.

Georgia Tech does not need or commit to meeting that high percentage of need. Georgia Tech doesn't do that. We basically say here is what it's going to cost to come to Georgia Tech. If you are able to finance that education, then you can obviously accept our offer whether or not they can make that kind of financial commitment and often in the end have to take loans to do it is going to be up to the up to the family. So so we make those offers understanding that we probably aren't going to be able to yield them all, aren't going to be able to yield is admissions speak for they know the students aren't all going to enroll.

We know that from the very beginning. Even somebody getting state scholarships and federal Pell Grants could end up still needing 10000 dollars a year for tuition, Clark says. Facing that, some students choose a school that offers more financial aid.

But it's probably way more common everywhere this happens, they end up somewhere less selective, less prestigious, close to home and cheaper, which is to say it's not just the cities that keep otherwise qualified, low income and first generation students out of elite schools.

It's also money, specifically how much money colleges have to help those students until last year.

Angel Perez was in charge of enrollment at Trinity College. We saw this with every class.

He admitted, you know, there were so many low income Christian kids in my pool that I could admit extremely qualified. But there were only a certain amount of dollars that I had in order to fully fund them. I'm going to be back.

Tartuffe now, who reported today's program with me because part, when you wrote your latest book, you actually followed Angel Perez during this process as he tried to enroll more low income and first generation kids at Trinity College.

Yeah, it was really hard. I mean, there was no question that this was what he wanted to do. This is what the president of the college wanted him to do. But at the same time, you know, Trinity College was losing millions of dollars a year.

And they are, like many institutions, a place that gets most of their revenue from tuition. He had a goal that he had to make to get a certain amount of tuition from all the students that he admitted. I think it was 19 million dollars he needed to bring in. And so it didn't mean that he only admitted rich kids who could pay a lot. But it did mean that every student that he was evaluating, that was the first question he had to ask.

Is this someone who's going to help me with the bottom line or not? Again, Angel Perez.

And every time you are thinking about adding a student or subtracting a student, you have to go back and run the econometric model to see financially where are you and whether or not you have blown the financial aid budget or whether or not you now do not have enough predicted tuition revenue to, you know, to uphold the college's budget the following year.

How can you just talk about this thing that you saw him do, that he had students that he really wanted to bring to Trinity, that he just couldn't?

Yeah, I mean, it was especially at the last the last part of the process was when I saw it the most. Right. Because he started off just creating the class that he really wanted, all these highly qualified students, including a lot more low income students, first generation students. But then it was right around this time of year was the middle of March. And everyone was that he was admitting was making it harder for him to meet his tuition goals.

Tensions were kind of running high. It was very emotional in his office with him and all of his admissions people. So the last weekend, he and the director of admissions just sent everybody else home and they just sat together at their computer and went through one by one. And the last, you know, few dozen students that he cut were all, you know, low income ones who needed significant financial aid. So that's a normal year. Think about how many of those low income students these same schools can afford today, Perez says with financial problems that schools have had since the pandemic, Perez actually monitors the big picture with admissions around the country today and the job that he took when he left Trinity College a year ago.

He's now head of the National Association of College Admissions, counseling even the wealthiest institutions with high endowments.

They have taken big hits this year and they collected less tuition. They are doing budget cuts. They are laying people off. And so I'm hesitant to say we will see dramatic shifts in one year and underrepresented students at these institutions because of that difficult financial component.

He says he expects a small bump in the number of these students had certain kinds of schools like flagship state schools.

But overall, and this is important, the number of low income students and first generation students going to college this coming fall is probably going to drop for the first time in years.

How do we know this?

Well, a bunch of ways, but most significant, federal student aid applications FAFSA are down 10 percent this year.

Overall, lots of kids around the country are downgrading, delaying or giving up on college plans because money has been so tight during the pandemic. I talked to one girl, Abigail, who took a job at Wal-Mart's pharmacy to help her family rather than go to community college.

And she was like, all right, she's making money. Why change?

I do think about college a lot. Still, like maybe my life would be different, but I kind of like it how it is now. Like, you kind of just realize that I like this lifestyle, you know, and I don't really feel comfortable going with something I don't know, like college.

But if I like how I am right now and then when I'm working right now, then I shouldn't really go.

So this fall, expect some schools to see a small increase in students like Danniella, but the overall number of students like her going to college next year will drop.

Coming around to admissions directors, one of the other things I was interested in was most of the best schools in the country were used to using the SAT as this tool to figure out who they were going to admit.

For years, the schools have resisted calls to change that.

So what was it like for them this year to do the jobs without it? The answer, of course, varied from school to school.

John Buckets, dad, who runs admissions at Oregon State University, has watched and written about the politics of test optional for years.

He likes test optional and his career is taken to schools test optional. He says this year, for many of his peers, he thinks it's a relief to have it gone.

One of the ways that the schools are always judged was by their SAT scores when they SAT scores were published each year in places like the U.S. News and World Report ranking of best colleges.

I think if you talk to admissions people, they will say they're happy to be rid of the test because it allows them to make decisions free of that albatross hanging around their neck. They don't have to worry about the average test score going down. They can find students who are interesting and who would bring something really valuable to the campus but may not have that stellar score.

In that sense, he says the pandemic got some admissions. People get away with something they'd wanted to do for a while to ditch the SATs. Of course, lots of admissions directors did not see the SAT as an albatross. They saw it as valuable and helpful as they made their decisions.

One person like that is the head of undergraduate admissions at Yale, Jeremiah Quinlan. He was lucid and unapologetic, enlisting the merits of the SAT in admissions.

Yeah, right now, he says, because they've got people applying from all kinds of schools all over the world, it's useful to have something that's consistent among applicants, even when we're aware of how limited and imperfect that metric can be, a.k.a. the SAT or the ACT. It could be especially valuable since our internal research we look at these things regularly show that the tests are predictive of your performance above and beyond high school GPA. He means.

In other words, even though studies show that in general, at most colleges, your high school GPA is a better predictor of how you do with a particular population of students they have at Yale, he says. Ezat predicts better so how they do in their first year and over four years.

And it is often common that strong test scores helped boost the case of a student from an underrepresented background who doesn't have other strong and compelling elements in their field and and elevate them in the committee's eyes because the testing is the data point that sort of affirms their ability to do well on a college campus.

He argues that at Yale they have figured out a way to keep using the SAT but still increase the diversity of their first year class. In the last eight years, they've gone from 12 percent low income students to 21 percent and 12 percent first generation students to 19 percent. Right now, at the point of the year that we are in right now, we are coming to the end of the selection process that most top schools around the country, they usually send out decision students by the end of March.

Yes, over 11000 more applicants than last year, Quinlan's says even working six and seven days a week to get to them all says it's also a more diverse pool of applicants than in the past.

But whether or not that will translate to what the overall admissions outcomes are still remains to be seen.

Do you feel like not having the SAT is actually giving you access to students that you wouldn't have had access to? And you feel like, oh, there's a plus side to it also. Yes, but I have more to say about that when we get through the process and we can actually see whether or not the students are rising in our pool and getting admitted and they're ultimately coming to Yale. But I think it is clear that there are students who are in our pool this year who would not have been in our pool previously because of our test optional policies.

And I think the big question on a lot of the schools that suddenly went test optional this year was how hard would this be to do the jobs without the SATs, where the come out of the process confident that they had chosen the best students for their schools, the nonprofit that does the other big standardized tests, the ACT test did a survey of admissions and enrollment directors asking about this. A third of them said going test optional this year made admissions decisions highly or extremely difficult.

Of course, that means two thirds did not see it that way. The admissions directors that I talked to, I said wasn't so bad.

If anything, it proved to them that doing admissions without the SATs was manageable, like they could do it and find students they were happy with. Again, Jeremiah Quinlan now.

And I could say that it has not been as disruptive as we had thought it was going to be. We have found that if you just spend a little bit more time looking at the transcript, the essays, letters of recommendation or even an interview, you could find evidence of academic preparation or curiosity or excitement or fit for Yale that can make us confident in our ability to admit the right type of students when they go to applications.

It became a lot more important to the admissions people I talked to. Now, they didn't have the SATs seeing the rigor of a student's curriculum, like how many Advanced Placement classes did they take, that kind of thing and what do they get in this classes?

Understandable, of course, but it obviously gave a boost to students from high schools with more resources that offer a lot of advanced classes as that's what's going to happen after the pandemic. The schools go back to requiring the SAT. Several admissions directors that I talked to said that it was going to be hard to go back to the way things were with other schools, might have to stay test optional just to compete with all the other schools that will state test optional.

The 900 pound gorilla at the table on that one is the University of California Board of Regents seems very committed to not going back to the SAT to attract California students who might decide not to take the test or to compete with the University of California for the best students. When admissions director said you might have to state test optional, though on the flip side, John Bach instead thinks maybe some magnet schools would see advantages in going back to the SAT.

So there's reputational benefits to it. You must be you must be really good because you're hard to get into because your test scores suggest that.

Asseri, Topol, some schools like the SATs because they need students who can pay full tuition and high SAT scores, give them the reason to pick those kids over others and it gives them a justification for it.

But you're saying it's a justification because it's hard to say that out loud, but it's easy to say we need test scores.

It's easy to say we want test scores. It's hard to say we would prefer to have 60 percent of our students not receive financial aid.

We invited the nonprofit that runs the SATs, the College Board, for an interview about their future in a post pandemic world. They declined, but sent a written statement saying the College Board supports schools that decide to go test optional and stating also, quote, When used in context, test scores can help admissions officers diversify campus and set students up for success when they arrive.

It's clear, however, this shakes out.

The SATs and Acts are going to emerge from the pandemic substantially weaker than they were before, like football teams that lost tons of yardage that they may or may not regain in that survey of colleges that the city's competitor, the ACT test published this month.

Half the schools that when test optional because of covid said that there would be unlikely to go back to requiring SAT or ACT scores. In the end, the main thing that will probably determine whether schools go back to requiring the SAT will be how the students perform, who they chose without SATs or more them drop out, whether grades be lower.

One of the things I learned when I was calling around to admissions directors is that whatever the studies say about how good grades are at predicting who's going to do well in college, lots of them still trust the SATs and find them useful.

One told me he definitely was worried that the students he was choosing without the SATs would not succeed at his school and in their jobs. Admissions directors are evaluated on whether the students they select stay in school and graduate.

Coming up, a glimpse at a very different way to run a college.

And is part of it getting in tons of students without looking at their SATs? That's in a minute. Chicago Public Radio when our program. For years. Support for this American life comes from choice ology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab hosted by Katie Milkman, a behavioral scientist, Wharton professor and author of How to Change Choice OLogy, is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions here, true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and more about why we do the things we do.

Listen to Choice at Schwab Dotcom podcast or wherever you listen. Support for this American life comes from Headspace. Headspaces is one of the only meditation apps advancing the field of mindfulness and meditation through clinically validated research and can reduce stress, improve sleep, boost focus and increase your overall sense of well-being. Go to Headspace Dotcom slash American for a free one month trial. This is their best deal offered right now. Headspace Dotcom Slash American. To American Life, I'm IRA Glass.

Today show the campus tour has been canceled with college admissions all jumbled up this year thanks to the pandemic. We're doing an episode today about one of the biggest changes that's come as part of it. Most schools around the country, including most of the top schools for now anyway, have stopped requiring the SAT and ACT tests in admissions. I can report in today's program with reporter Paul Tough.

So far in our program, we've been talking about why this is such a big deal, what its impact might be.

And in this last part of the show, we're going to turn to the future or anyway a picture of one possible future.

We have arrived at Act two of our program, Act two, a world without the need for number two pencils.

So if you want to imagine what college admissions might look like without the SAT being required, one place you could go is the University of Texas at Austin.

UT Austin is the flagship school of the Texas system, one of the top ranked public universities in the country. And since 1998, because of a state law, they've been doing something at UT that no other big university in the country does. Every year, they admit most of their freshman class based strictly on students class rank, who has the highest grades in their high school without paying attention to their SAT scores at all. This law is known as the top 10 percent rule because the way it worked when they started was that if you were in the top 10 percent of your high school class, you were automatically admitted to UT Austin.

Since then, the percentage of students has gone down now as the top six percent of your class. But it works the same. Doesn't matter what you get in your city, if you're in the top of your class, you're in. So you end up with is the top students from rich suburban high schools around Dallas and rural towns in West Texas and Latino majority schools in the Rio Grande Valley.

And it makes it a very different freshman class at UT than you would see at most state flagship colleges. And it also makes it an especially interesting place to ask a question that's relevant now as we contemplate whether to bring back the SAT after the pandemic. What happens if you just ignore students test scores? What happens if you admit students with great grades from a variety of high schools who do well in the classroom but not on the SAT students like Daniela? Well, turns out admitting students based only on their grades, their class rank from high schools all over the state makes you a very different university from others in some significant and interesting ways, Paul explains.

When I was reporting my book, I spent a lot of time at UT and I met a lot of students there who had been admitted with excellent high school grades and lower test scores. Yvonne, I met on the first day of her freshman calculus class.

She was from the west side of San Antonio, a neighborhood where no one had much money, a high school where teachers kept leaving in the middle of the year. In many ways, her story was just like Daniela's.

She was number two in her class, but her SAT score was only so.

So in her case, though, her test score didn't make her question her identity and her self-worth like it did for Daniela.

She just figured it was her high school. I realized that, like, it's a reflection of like my educational system, the one that I come from. So for my high school and I think a lot of us, we knew, like we talked about our school and how it was really bad and like this is our reality and it's kind of what we have to deal with, how we knew our education was terrible.

After she saw her SAT score, Yvonne didn't apply to a lot of her first choice schools, just like Daniela. But unlike Daniela, Yvonne knew she had this safety net.

The SAT was not going to derail her college plans.

It was like, no matter the consequences of this exam, I know someone I know it's going to take me because my banking is good. So it's fine. I still have it. I'll go to New York. And she didn't see UT as a consolation prize.

She knew it was a great school. Her older sister was going there. It seemed exciting. But arriving at UT was a shock to our system, especially calculus, her professor was a man named Urry Triesman, a well-known math educator, and his strategy is to start the first class of freshman calculus with these really high level mathematical proofs so everyone can feel confused together like a bonding exercise. It freaked Iran out. She was a math major and she'd taken AP calculus.

But she says her math teachers in high school didn't really seem to know what they were doing. And when I met her that first day of freshman calculus, she was totally lost because I never seen proofs.

I had never seen calculus taught in that way. So I would fail almost every exam and just struggle.

Every test it was calculus made me doubt my my ability to complete college so many times.

When the top 10 percent rule was introduced in Texas in the late 90s, this was what people were worried about. Good students from subpar high schools would be out of their depth at a rigorous place like UT Austin. Basically the same worry that a lot of admissions officers today are having now that they're admitting students without a SAT scores, they fear students will be like Yvonne was when she first got to UT. And there's some data to justify those fears.

Students like Yvonne, students where there's a real mismatch between their good high school grades and their lower SATs, they usually do quite well when they get to good colleges, but their graduation rates are on average slightly lower than students with higher SATs. And for some of them, the transition to college can be rough. Yvonne says for her, the problem was that she never learned in high school how to study because I never had to study for high school and high school was never challenging academically.

So when you first got there, did you feel like there was sort of, I don't know, like two tiers of students, like the ones who were who were coming from, you know, backgrounds like yours where their high schools weren't the greatest and others who had had, like, sort of perfect academic preparation.

I think you could just tell by, like, what some people were wearing.

By the way, this interview was over the Internet and the sound quality wasn't the best. So like some girls that we were ogg's, I obviously knew I couldn't afford drugs. And then that's when I would start asking them questions like, oh, why school did you go? So I would bring up the past to see, like, I guess in a sense make myself understand, like it's OK. It's like I'm struggling now because I come from a bad high school and they are doing better because they were all better high school.

This was exactly the situation that her calculus professor or a tribesman was focused on students who feel like they're starting from way behind. Here's one of the things he would do every weekend. He would have these long office hours where the students would come in and talk. I sat in on a lot of these sessions back in 2017 and they weren't anything like other professors office hours. He and his students didn't really talk much about math.

Hi, Yvonne. Yeah, you are working so hard in this class. Yeah. I mean, are you getting basically, um, I feel like sometimes it's more than most, but not the best.

This was October. Yvonne was about halfway through freshman calculus. She was still feeling totally out of her depth and had a lot of colleges. What they do with students like that is put them in a remedial class, something they can handle. Triesman does the opposite. It's a method he came up with decades ago when he was teaching at Berkeley, how he noticed that when struggling students were put into remedial math, they usually never caught up. But if you took the same students and put them in a challenging program, pushed them to see how well they could perform, they would rise to the occasion, if that's what you tell them.

First, though, there was usually a lot of anguish.

And at UT freshman calculus was in large part about managing students anxiety and self-doubt. So tradesmen's office hours were a combination of bonding, session therapy and pep talk.

Feel good to be successful in here? Have you ended up in like a really honors calculus? Super duper difficult. Yeah, and most people would run away. You are feeling tremendously stressed, but you're not running away. I still love math, even though I feel like I'm struggling with it. Like I remember my teacher once said, like, I'm very like Stepford, so I feel like I still want to stay.

And so this is a key characteristic of mathematician's stubbornness. Yeah, we don't give up, but I'm worried that I'm pushing you in a way we are losing self-confidence. Oh, I feel like I definitely am.

Transman tells her he knows she's in a class with students who already master this material back in high school. You're going to catch up with them in a few weeks, in a month. But because you always did well and now you're struggling, you're saying yourself, maybe I couldn't live to be here, is that you're in your head. It pops up once in a while. But I feel like I don't know, it's just stressful because I feel like I'm falling behind some not getting like the full concept.

But I know, like, if I put my effort out eventually. Well, but I feel like by that time it'll be too good. I it won't be too late. You have to trust me.

Even wanted to trust Professor Triesman, but she didn't feel like she was catching up.

Not at all. On the first big test you've got a 67 on the first midterm she did worse of 59, but the second midterm coming up in the middle of November. Yvonne was studying like crazy. And the night before the exam, there was a moment when the puzzle pieces briefly seemed to be fitting into place. I talked to her later that week.

I sat down and I was like, OK, I can see the logic and I can do it. And then, like, some time later on that night, I like I couldn't do it anymore. Like the problem that I did before it became harder. I could look back at what you used to know, like you were going backwards. Yeah, I feel like I was going back. And then I was like, OK, like, don't do this to.

So I went to sleep. I set it off. But then I woke up and I woke up feeling like I was gone. I think it was the stress probably because, like that's why I started crying the way in the bus I was going, oh, you know, like I don't feel ready, I, I really can take it.

She got off the bus and she was walking through campus on her way to the midterm and her phone rang. It was her mom back home in San Antonio. And she's like, have you been crying or does it sound like you're crying? And I told her, like, I don't feel prepared. And she she's like, Oh, it's OK. You can go come back to you.

You say UTSA is the University of Texas in San Antonio, less demanding than Austin and less prestigious thing is that made it worse.

I actually hung up on her. Yvonne sat down on a bench outside of the lecture hall where the exam was going to happen.

Looking miserable. The teaching assistant, a woman named Erica Winter, came over to check on her. The two of them talked it over and Erica told her she should just take the exam later in the week.

I guess because like I was, I look like I was crying and I looked like hysterical. And I like Professor Treisman emailed me a day. He's like, I know I heard what happened. And like, honestly, I didn't reply because I feel ashamed because, like, I feel like they're putting in all this effort and I feel like I'm just not, like, leading up to them as I make them. So I guess I don't only feel like I'm fooling myself.

I feel like I'm telling them she got a fifty five on that midterm thing seem to be heading in the wrong direction. And the final is coming up. Professor Tradesmen's calculus classes. There was always a lot of pressure before the final because if you did well, that grade would replace all of your previous grades in the course. But if Yvonne wasn't able to turn things around in the final, she'd end up with a D or an F in the course.

She'd probably have to switch majors. One of the things that makes the University of Texas interesting is that the kind of support Yvonne was getting from Erica and Professor Triesman was happening in different forms all over campus.

The person coordinating this was a science professor named David Lawdy.

He had started small trying to help students who were failing his own introductory chemistry course, who often had significantly lower SAT scores. He created a special section for them with smaller classes, extra attention, kind of a school within a school on a sprawling campus of 40000 students. Just like every tribesman. He emphasized that this was not a remedial program. These students took the same exams as everybody else, covered the same challenging material.

And in the end, those students, even though just looking at SAT distributions were several hundred points lower on average, ended up getting exactly the same grades as the students in the larger course.

And I'm curious, but at that moment, like what you thought about those SAT scores, like I feel like there are a lot of science professors out there who look at a group that has lower S.A.T. scores and just things like these kids are not as smart. Right.

But that's that's measuring something real about them. Did you have that feeling?

Like what what did you make of those lower SAT scores? Well, as someone who earned one of those low SAT scores myself, it wasn't as if I was. I think it's safe to say that my view of SAT scores and what they meant about an individual was probably different from a lot of folks.

He grew up in a farm town, and when he got to college, he had no idea what he was doing. He almost dropped out his first year so he could relate. And in 2012, when he became a vice provost at UT, he took what he learned from helping his chemistry students, expanded it and brought it to the entire campus, peer mentors, study groups, counseling Summer Orientation's tutoring centers. He called it the kitchen sink approach.

And how much time it took was very different than what you might think. I don't think the students should be in a four year program that isolates them from the rest of the campus. My sense was give them a semester, maybe two, and then mainstream them so that by the time they're a sophomore in college, they really don't appear to be different from anybody else.

Yvonne was placed into a couple of ladies support programs when she enrolled at UT and in calculus after her midterm breakdown, Erika, her T.A., invited her to join an all female study group she had set up. They started meeting a couple of times a week in the library.

OK, but I want to answer one question. Is you right here in this integral? Is you a constant or not? That's Erica in these early sessions, they could spend an hour and a half on a single problem. There were a lot of long silences why no one wanted to be the first person to suggest a wrong answer.

You're just going to have to write things down that are wrong, like you're going to be wrong in college so much more than you were in high school. And it's super annoying.

But then in one session, the light bulb went on and Yvonne was the first one to get it right. Is that related to getting you over here?

I mean, what did we start when we started?

We. Yeah, because you plug in I mean, you move the eye over and then you divide it by two and then you get the two in front. OK.

Oh, I think it was one of the first times she made a suggestion in calculus all year as the study group continued, even started taking more chances, risking more wrong answers, growing more confident. And things started to click just in time. I saw her on the morning of the calculus final and she looked happy. She told me she had gone back through the whole textbook over the weekend and for the first time she understood everything.

I was like, Wait, hold on, this makes sense. And I was like, OK, this relates to that and that. And I was able to really like later today, just like earlier today, like only makes sense when we learn that in the beginning, you know, sounds like she was right to be excited.

She aced the final, which meant she had an A in the course. She went on to advanced calculus the next semester and did well in that too. She went from failure and despair in October of her freshman year to being a successful math major by the end of May.

Remember David, Lottie's point that struggling freshmen don't need constant support over all four years of college, just a semester or two?

That's what happened with Ivan once things clicked for her in that calculus class. They never really uncloaked.

She says once, of course, has got harder in junior and senior year. It didn't feel like classmates from better schools had an edge anymore. It was equally hard for everybody. She was contributing as much in study groups as anyone.

Yvonne, story is actually not that unusual. There's an economist at Columbia University named Sandra Black who has looked at the effect of the top 10 percent program at UT, not just on individual students, but on everybody. She did this one study where she looked at students like Yvonne, students who got into UT only because of top 10.

So this is the really interesting part, I think, or the really cool finding is that they they do really well. So more likely to graduate with a four year degree. They do better in terms of earnings in the long run. And so really, it seems like this concern, I think, that people have that these students are going to be unprepared, really seems not to be an issue. They aren't out of their league.

The remarkable thing about this data is that it's all from the first years of top 10 percent back before David Lawdy introduced his programs to the campus. These students are doing even better now. Sandra Black also did a study imagining how UT Austin and Texas A&M, the other state flagship, would change if they suddenly introduced a strict SAT cutoff to top 10 percent, rejecting students whose scores fell below a certain point.

She found that UT and A&M would have more kids graduating in four years, but only a few percent more. But there'd be a big effect on diversity. Black and Hispanic students would go from 24 percent of the student body to 14 percent, and you'd lose three fourths of the students who came from the lowest income schools.

So the cost would be very high relative to the benefit.

Yvonne is now a senior at UT. She's planning to go to graduate school next year and data science. A few weeks ago she got into Harvard. I have to admit, I don't think it's what I would have predicted for her during those dark days and freshman calculus.

Do you ever think about what would have happened if there was not a top 10 percent program like where you would have gone, where you would have gotten in and how your life would be different?

Honestly, I think that's a really good question, because I. I think my life would be very different because I think if top was not a rule, I would probably not apply to you team and apply to like universities, I would have probably stayed home and applied to a community college.

If you look back to the moment right before Yvonne was admitted to the University of Texas, you can see the paths diverging in front of her. One would have led her to community college in San Antonio. The other led her to graduate school at Harvard right now and admissions offices all over the country. They're finalizing their decisions. And for the first time at hundreds of schools, the SAT won't be there to stop them from enrolling students like Yvonne. Which means that next year may be at least a few more students will get the chance to prove themselves the way she did.

Part of his book about the college admissions process, I cannot say enough about how much I liked it, the stories of the people that he tells, but also the way that he lays out the data describing the big picture. It's called the Inequality Machine, How College Divides US.

What was produced today by me and on a baker, the people put together our show today, could Ben Calhoun activist Shinkolobwe Kornfeld or Elkins, Damien Graves, Settlin Tobacco, Mickey Nicolina, me CEO Nelson, Katherine Raimondo, Nattie Raymond, Ari Sapperstein, Robin Semien and Christopher Satava, Matt Tierney and Julie Whiteaker. Our managing editor Sara Abderrahmane are senior editors. David Kestenbaum, our executive editor is Manuell Barry Special.

Thanks to the identical herd and the many college advising Corps counselors and counselors who talk to us, Rhonda Suarez from KERA, who helped with reporting, Stephen Farmer, Ryan Hogan, Jared Cash, Kat Tuatara Miller, Akeel Bello, Cook, Brandon, Robert Schwartz. Christine is born Ameerah Ringold nor Gail Kandace Cooper, CEO Cogenitor Romeros, Zach WEMA, Matt Barnham, Regino Trevino, EOI Oakley, Susan Pearson Brown and Kelly Anderson. Our website, This American Life dot org, where you can listen to our archive of 700 episodes for absolutely free.

This American life is devoted to public radio stations by parks. The Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's cofounder, Mr Terry Malatya. You know, he took one of those BuzzFeed quizzes. Which character from Sex in the City are you said he was Miranda, even though, of course, he always thought of himself as a Carrie.

But that test was saying otherwise, you know, so when I got that test results, I was kind of questioning whether I was AmeriGas back next week with more stories of this American life.

Next week on the podcast of This American Life in high school, Gary Coleman didn't want to be a football player, and he got this phone call from two coaches called themselves The Jetsons.

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