Yale test-optional 2024

It's hard to tell at this moment. For example in the past day, all public universities in Georgia will reinstate the SAT and ACT requirements for the next cycle. I think this will be a common trend among certain public schools because it's always easier to determine admits if the criteria are something they can point to like a test score.

I personally think that many Ivys and Top Elite colleges may keep the test-optional policy in place because of the positive optics and the fact they love having more applicants and lower admit rates without doing very much themselves. It's an all-or-nothing proposition at this point. I say the Top 50 schools are all test-optional, then I think either most of them will remain test-optional or they will all go back to standardized tests as a group. Otherwise, admit rates will be all over the place.

For applicants, it's actually worse in general for all the best schools to be test-optional because regardless of the policy, at least 2/3rd of successful applicants had test scores. In some cases, it was close to 90% of successful admits (MIT REA). The only level playing field that makes sense if all the best schools are test blind. But as long as they are test-optional, the most entitled applicants with $$$ resources and support will find a way to test prep for a 99% percentile score and travel to the test center to take it.

Standardized testing is a Billion dollar business so I don't envision CollegeBoard or ACT.org disappearing anytime soon. Testing and college admissions are like a symbiotic relationship between a host and a parasite. Colleges benefit from standardized testing because it gives them additional data points to support or deny certain applicants and it makes their ratings look good when they have more applicants and lower admit rates.

I think what will happen is that since the RD admit rates are miserably low, more and more applicants will be applying for Early Decision or Early Action because rather than a 3%-6% rate, they will apply when their chances are 8-18% or something like that. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if more elite schools follow UChicago and have multiple early decision tranches like EDI and EDII to push up their yield rates.

This is my prediction for the future of Ivies. Since they are very reluctant to build more dorms and expand their campuses to admit more freshmen, I think they may move to an ED lottery system. So if you want to apply to an Ivy, you rank up to 8 schools in the order of your preference like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, UPenn, Dartmouth, and Cornell. And the colleges determine who goes where by bidding on the students. All the decisions are binding so if you get picked or matched by Brown, you have to go there and you can't apply to any other schools. I think this is a much better system than everyone applying to 5 to 8 Ivys where some don't get into any and others get into all 8 but they waste 7 spots. And if you don't get matched by any of them, you can still apply to any of them for RD.

Hope you get my point about test scores and that you should continue to study for them and aim for a 99% percentile score.

The Ivy League has gone test-optional for 2022-2023.  UPenn, Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale have extended all extended their policies for 2023. Columbia and Cornell have extended their policies through 2024. Harvard has extended even further to 2026. Since extending test-optional policies is the hot trend for top colleges, let’s talk about it.

What is test-optional?

Just so we are all on the same page, a school being test-optional means you do not need to submit ACT/SAT scores to be considered for admission. Schools have promised that not submitting tests will not negatively impact your application, however, most of the schools that we will be talking about in this blog post have not released any data on how many students they have accepted without scores (schools if you are reading this, that data would really help our students DM us!).

While some schools have been test-optional for years, most schools have adopted these policies due to the pandemic. The pandemic has made it hard for some communities to access testing and so in a play for fairness, many top schools have adopted a test-optional policy for, at least, the time being.

So how long do we think that will be?

The Ivy league tends to stick together. When one does something, the others usually follow and Harvard extending this policy to 2026 is a good metric. They might not announce it this year, but other top schools will most likely announce next year that they are extending their test-optional policies as far out as Harvard. TLDR as long as one of the Ivies is extending the policy, the others probably will too. 

However, we have a feeling that this policy might become permanent. There are two major reasons that we think this might happen, so let’s break them down.  

1)    It’s hard to go back

This policy has now been around for 2 years and will be around for another 3 in some cases. This means this policy will have been working for at least 5 years when Harvard can choose not to renew it. If something has been working well for 5 years, hopefully not all of them in a pandemic (PLEASE we can’t do 3 more years of this global panorama,) it’s hard to go back on it. Don’t get us wrong, test-optional policies could be scrapped as the world reopens, but we think a lot of schools will have seen that this policy works fine. The simple truth is it is hard to get rid of a popular policy that has been working.

But we think there is something else to this. Break out your tin foil hats, because we think there is something going on a little deeper here and we have a theory.

2)    Follow the money

Two things have been rising across the Ivy League since the test-optional policy has been implemented: the number of applicants and the endowment.  

The number of applicants is an important metric for a top school. The Ivies take around the same number of students every year no matter how many people apply. The only way they can keep competitive acceptance rates is to have high numbers of students apply. Generally, the more people apply, the lower the acceptance and thus the more competitive the school is to get into.

Let’s look at some numbers for the past few years:

*Columbia either did not publish their class statistics for 2023 or they have scrubbed it from the internet which, either way, is strange. Like you good Columbia?

We know it’s kind of a block of numbers. But the important trend is that while internally colleges had similar acceptance rates and applicant numbers for 2023 and 2024, for 2025 across the board every school had more applicants than they did in the past and thus a more competitive acceptance rate. Pretty much when schools went test-optional more people applied and thus the college is harder to get into.

And that makes sense. If you look at admissions statistics, most schools include what the average test scores are for the incoming class. For the Ivies, those numbers are really high. Seriously, we are talking for a middle 50% of an incoming class getting a 35-36 on the ACT in some cases. Students with good but not great test scores see this and often don’t apply because of it. Yes, test scores are only part of your application, but if you don’t have competitive test scores, in the past we would have advised you to skip schools like Harvard. However, now, that’s a more complicated conversation for a lot of students who have great grades and extracurriculars but so-so test scores. This type of student is thus inflating the applicant numbers for these schools.

Most schools won’t admit it, but they want to look as competitive as possible. Even if they aren’t taking a ton of these new test-optional applicants, their numbers are making the school look better. It sounds frivolous, but there might be something bigger to this too. This is where we should probably restate that this is just a theory of ours…. But, as schools get more competitive their endowment often gets bigger.

So what’s an endowment? In business words, it's an aggregation of assets invested by an institution that can be used for research, education, or the continued mission of the college through funding. In laymen’s terms, it’s a large amount of money that a college can grow through investments and donations. Colleges can use their endowments to finance projects like research, building new state-of-the-art buildings, etc. The Ivy Leagues have historically had pretty huge endowments, but they have all gotten bigger recently. Since 2018, a lot of them have shot up dramatically. There are a lot of reasons for this. These are investments and good investments do tend to grow on their own. However, endowments get money in them by donations.

Usually, these donations come from alums. There are other places donations come from, but alumni donations are super important. And being able to say you went to a super-competitive school is important to a lot of alumni. Think of Andy from The Office with his Cornell hat. Alums want to say they went to the most prestigious school and having a super low acceptance rate is often how they do that.

UPenn’s endowment for the 2020-2021 fiscal year is $20.5 billion. That is substantially larger than their endowment back in 2018 (before their test-optional policy) which was $14.7 billion. Brown went from $3.8 billion to $6.9 billion in the same time frame. Dartmouth’s endowment in 2018 was close to $5.5 billion, in 2020-2021 it was $8.5. Cornell was at $6.9 billion in 2018 but raised that to $10 billion. Columbia went from $10.9 billion to $14.35 billion.

Princeton’s endowment  is around $37.7 billion which is 1) insane and 2) a lot more than their 2018 endowment of $25.9 billion (which for the record is also insane.) Keeping with the wildly high numbers, Yale turned $29.4 billion in 2018 to $42.3 billion.

And Harvard…. Well, Harvard already had the largest endowment in the league, but they took their 2018 endowment of $39.2 billion and pushed it to the staggering $53.2 billion in the 2020 fiscal year. 

These numbers are giant and honestly kind of hard to even comprehend, but as applications have gone up across the board so have they. Hey, it might be purely correlative, but we think it’s a factor. And maybe it’s none of our business, but we are in this business.

Who are we to say? Well, we are a highly trained team of people who’ve done a ton of research into the Ivy League… Still, we can’t prove that keeping schools test-optional has made it easier for schools to use lower acceptance rates to push alums to pad their endowments… but we aren’t not saying that. Do we think schools will keep this policy around longer because it’s good for them? Professionally, we do.

The good news here is test-optional policies can really help some students. While we worry that some of those students are probably athletes and legacies and not just students who aren’t able to get tested due to a global pandemic but otherwise would have crushed their ACTs, the policies are popular. If a popular policy helps you pad your endowment, so be it. We just thought it was an interesting correlation and if you have made it to the end of this blog, we think you did too.

Need help getting to the school of your Ivy League dreams? We can also help with that! Reach out here.

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