Why Admissions Officials' Group Signed On to New America’s Open Letter to US News

New America’s Education Policy Program published an open letter on Monday calling on the editors of U.S. News & World Report to stop using the average SAT and ACT scores of incoming students to rank colleges. A dozen high-profile higher education organizations and individuals signed on to the letter including the National Association of College Admission Counseling (NACAC), which represents around 25,000 college counseling and admission professionals.

For NACAC, this is not a new fight. The organization has urged U.S. News to stop using standardized admissions test scores in the methodology for its Best Colleges List several times over the past 15 years.

The first time NACAC took a stand on this issue was in 2008, when NACAC convened a commission on standardized testing in undergraduate admissions, with an overarching goal of taking back the conversation around standardized testing in admissions. The commission argued that standardized tests were being used in ways that were out of step with why they had been created. The tests were meant to serve as an admissions tool to determine a student’s readiness for college, not to evaluate or rank colleges.

“In the rankings, you have a very tangible manifestation of a fundamental misuse of individual students' test scores,” says David Hawkins, NACAC’s chief education and policy officer.

In its response to NACAC’s 2008 report (entitled “About That NACAC Report on the SAT”), the editors of U.S. News wrote that they had no plans to change the methodology because it “reflects the current state of college admissions, where standardized tests are still used in the vast percentage of admissions decisions and have been playing an increasingly important role over the past few years.”

The magazine’s editors said that they would continue to use test scores in their methodology “as long as standardized tests play an integral role in the college admissions process.”

“The bottom line: If a meaningful percentage of colleges drop their SAT or ACT requirements for admission, then U.S. News will change our ranking model,” the editors wrote in 2008. “So far, that is not happening.”

NACAC revisited the issue in 2011, when the organization convened an ad hoc committee to conduct a thorough examination of U.S. News’ rankings methodology. The committee released a report detailing how the methodology relies heavily on input data—data institutions could claim no real purchase over—to evaluate the quality of institutions. Then in September 2020, NACAC convened yet another task force on the use of standardized test scores in admissions during COVID-19 and beyond. In each case, NACAC argued for the removal of test scores from the rankings methodology.

“The very profession around which U.S. News has built this rankings’ empire has asked, told, pleaded with them to cease and desist including test scores in the rankings,” Hawkins says. He says that U.S. News is “doing a disservice to” students, families, institutions and the admissions profession.

Hawkins says the test “fundamentally distorts a student's perspective on what a best college actually is.”

“Strike while the iron is hot”

Hawkins concedes that the Best Colleges list holds a complicated place in the world of admissions, and says that in their earlier reports about the rankings NACAC partly wanted to address the admissions profession as a whole. Admissions and high school counselors “love to hate and hate to love” college rankings lists, he says.

Students need to know about the average loan debt and graduation rates at institutions they are interested in attending—“good info that is easy to understand about colleges and universities is very important,” Hawkins says—but the rankings perpetuate an inequitable social structure among higher education institutions. Colleges feel that there is undue pressure to fit a certain profile that includes being as selective as possible. He describes it as admitting to the test, similar to teaching to the test.

Hawkins says that U.S. News realizes that the "Best Colleges'" lists have real public relations value to colleges, and institutions know they are not the only ones who drive the conversations around rankings: external stakeholders like alumni, governing boards, donors, and state legislators also track where an institution ranks. U.S. News’ methodology hurts schools that have gone test blind or test optional, which includes some NACAC members.

“Right now we are in a pivotal moment in global history and more directly in the history of college admissions and its ecosystem,” Hawkins says. After COVID-19 higher education needs to look in the mirror and ask if what is being done is helping or hurting students, he states, and if existing norms adequately address student equity.

“There is a moment right now,” Hawkins says, asking the field of higher education to: “strike while the iron is hot.”

Hawkins says that it’s time to “remind the ranking publications that a lot of what they’ve done is in fact questionable.”

A “transformative” leader

NACAC itself is embracing this momentum as well as the reform mindset. In July 2020, the organization brought on Angel B. Pérez as its CEO, highlighting him as “transformative.” Pérez, who previously served as the vice president of enrollment and student success at Trinity College, is known for his expertise in equity and access, and was labeled one of the most influential voices in college admissions in a 2019 Forbes article. Pérez has a proven history of creating change, especially through diversifying incoming college classes.

New America’s open letter to U.S. News comes at a time when many in admissions are reevaluating existing processes. NACAC recently received a Lumina Foundation grant to bring together thought leaders in higher education to examine ways to reinvent the college admissions process through an equity lens. NACAC hopes to publish findings from this examination at the end of the summer.

Pérez explains that high school counselors in particular have really struggled with the Best Colleges rankings methodology in the past. Pérez says that the rankings list has undue influence on students in the pipeline who are attracted by the allure of highly ranked colleges on the list. He emphasizes that making a college choice based on a ranking is not the best way for students to find the school that is the best fit for them.

“This is the perfect moment to rethink the formula, and really rankings in general,” Pérez says, citing the over 1,700 institutions that have removed the test score requirement from their admissions process as the opportunity to reevaluate the value of these test scores.

“The admissions process right now is being reinvented,” Pérez says. “[This is] a good moment for us to pause and think about what we really value in the admissions process.”

COVID-19 has highlighted pre existing inequities in the higher education system and paired with the reckoning of racial equity across the country, now is the time to question what role all areas of higher education have played in systemic inequality, Pérez says.

“This has to be the moment,” he says. “If we emerge from COVID and the admissions process looks exactly the same we have failed.”

If you'd like to add your name to the petition asking U.S. News to stop including incoming students' average test scores in their rankings methodology, you can do so here.

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