The COVID-19 pandemic may have fundamentally altered many aspects of education. One less appreciated area of focus is on how the college admissions process has been affected. Recent books by Jeffrey Selingo on who gets in and why, Ron Lieber on the price you pay, and Colin Diver on the influence of the ranking industry, all provide current overviews of the landscape, economics, psychology, and politics of higher education, at least up to the point when the pandemic entered our lives. However, what is really needed is solid research on how the pandemic might have impacted higher education and the admissions process. For example, whether and why students decide to submit their SAT or ACT scores to colleges when the pandemic pushed colleges to adopt test-optional admissions policies is important to understand.
Fortunately, many different groups have started initiatives to tackle these issues. One group I’m leading is the education working group of the Association for Psychological Science global collaboration on COVID-19, where we recently had an academic rockstar panel discussing the role of psychological science in addressing the case of COVID-19 and the college admissions process. In addition, a special issue from Perspectives on Psychological Science examining graduate school admissions was published along with expert commentary.
Now, a new report by the College Board has just been released which addresses SAT score submission decisions by students and other important ways that the pandemic has impacted the higher education landscape. This report, titled “New evidence on recent changes in college applications, admissions, and enrollments: Focus on the Fall 2021 admissions cycle,” is led by economist and College Board’s vice president of research, Jessica Howell. The report is the first of many that will come from the College Board Admissions Research Consortium, of which I am a member of the interdisciplinary research advisory committee. The purpose of the research consortium is as follows:
“Colleges are eager to understand how the impacts of the pandemic and widespread test optional admissions policies are shaping who is applying to their college, and how these impacts might continue to affect college grades and success in the future. Together with our members, College Board has kicked off the Admissions Research Consortium (ARC), which aims to help colleges do exactly that. ARC is a multiyear, collaborative research initiative with 80 participating colleges and associations, including the Association for Institutional Research (AIR), American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), and College Board. ARC is also guided by a Research Advisory Committee composed of academic and institutional researchers.”
This new report is focused on students in the high school graduating class of 2021 who would have been applying to college in the fall of 2020 for fall 2021 college entry. In fall 2020, when the pandemic was still in its infancy, many high schools were fully remote, students couldn’t go on campus tours or visit colleges, college guidance might have been missing or disrupted, vaccines were not yet available, and it was unclear if colleges would be open or virtual in the future. On top of all that, colleges’ test optional policies had just been announced. As a result, the changes observed in the fall 2021 application cycle, relative to prior years, capture the combined impact of all these factors on students and colleges.
I had the opportunity to ask Jessica Howell some questions about this new landmark report, which follows. The three main findings from this research brief address general shifts in student and college behavior, whether and how students chose to submit their SAT scores, and whether test-optional policies changed student body diversity. All these topics are addressed by data provided by the colleges and universities included in the consortium study.
Jessica
How did the students and colleges change their behavior during the pandemic and the first year of widespread test-optional college admissions?
Compared to the fall 2020 application cycle, which largely took place before the COVID-19 pandemic, the colleges in our study received more applications, admitted more students, and increased enrollments in the fall of 2021.
There were some colleges that were test optional before the pandemic, but when COVID forced test centers to close, virtually all colleges had to impose a policy that didn’t penalize students who were unable to take the SAT. With the widespread adoption of these test-optional admissions policies and less certainty around how college admissions processes would work compared to prior years, it is perhaps not surprising that nearly all institutions participating in the study received more applications than the prior year, although application growth under test-optional admissions is documented in some research but not all studies of pre-pandemic test-optional admissions. Institutions experienced a nearly 18% growth in applications that ranged from 10% application growth at selective public four-year institutions to 30% application growth at very selective private four-year institutions.
Many colleges in our study reported greater uncertainty about how many students they admitted would end up enrolling on their campuses, so institutions generally admitted more students (6% growth) for fall 2021 than in the prior year. Students did enroll, often at greater rates than colleges expected, so enrollment at these colleges grew by nearly 8% in the fall of 2021. The very selective private institutions in our sample (with admission rates below 25%) are the exception to these admission and enrollment patterns, admitting 12% fewer applicants than the prior year and, thus, keeping enrollment nearly flat in fall 2021 relative to fall 2020.
How did students navigate the choice about whether or not to submit their SAT or ACT scores on their college application?
Fall 2021 applicants to colleges in our study fall into three categories regarding test submission in a test-optional environment: (1) roughly 50% had an SAT or ACT score and chose to submit it to colleges, (2) nearly 30% had an SAT score that they chose not to submit to colleges, and (3) about 20% did not have an SAT score or had an ACT score that they chose not to submit to colleges.
Among those with a test score and a choice to make about whether or not to share it on their college applications, we find that the biggest driver of the decision is whether their score is high or low relative to typical scores at the college to which they’re applying. Applicants whose scores are relatively high are very likely to submit their scores, while applicants whose scores are relatively low are not very likely to submit their scores. Companion research based on student surveys and focus groups also revealed that relative test scores were central to how students make this decision. Very few other factors appear to influence students’ test score submission decision. We find some evidence that students with lower high school grades are more likely to submit their test scores (presumably to bolster their academic record). Conditional on test scores and high school grades, we find almost no difference in test score submission decisions across students with different demographics like parental education, race/ethnicity, and so on. Differences in score submission patterns by race, parental education, and income documented in previous research are attributable to differences in academic achievement among score submitters and non-submitters. Once you control for test scores and the college to which a student is applying, students with different demographic attributes have nearly the same probability of submitting their test score in a test-optional environment.
Did test-optional change diversity at these colleges?
Prior research on test-optional college admissions finds either no change in racial and socioeconomic diversity or small changes. In our new research, we find that, because the enrollment of all subgroups of students increased between fall 2020 and fall 2021, the proportional representation of student subpopulations—by race and socioeconomic status—changed very little at these institutions. Black, Hispanic, and Native students made up about 25% of college enrollees in the sample before and after the pandemic and test-optional admissions policies were in place. Similarly, students from disadvantaged schools and communities made up the same proportion of college enrollees before and after. So, overall, we don’t find a change in trend to the racial/ethnic representation of students in this first year of near universal test-optional policies. The exception to this pattern is among the very selective private four-year colleges, who saw modest gains (about 3 percentage point growth) in both racial and socioeconomic diversity in fall 2021 relative to the prior year. These enrollment patterns in racial and socioeconomic diversity are consistent with separate analyses based on a near-universal set of U.S. four-year institutions, so these results are generalizable beyond this study sample.
It is important to note that 2021 was not a “normal” time with a handful of colleges changing their policies as in the prior research. In this case, test-optional policies were certainly not the only change that students and colleges were navigating, so we have to attribute the changes we document in this new research to the many pandemic-related disruptions that were also occurring simultaneously (e.g., a global health crisis, a domestic economic crisis, remote learning and learning losses, and mental health challenges) in addition to nearly all U.S. colleges and universities changing to a temporary test-optional policy.
Conclusions and future research
In sum, this first brief demonstrates that Admissions Research Consortium colleges have more/different students enrolled than they’ve historically served, so it will be interesting to see if there are differences in student performance, retention, and longer run outcomes like major choice and degree completion. Jessica Howell lets me know that this is what is up next in the research pipeline, and this consortium is ongoing and will publish more research on student outcomes as the group continues to track fall 2021 enrollees and study the fall 2022 cycle, serving as a dynamic process for both students and institutions, hopefully informing policy decisions in that process with solid evidence.
Regarding how students decide whether they submit their SAT or ACT scores to colleges, one fascinating finding from this report is that it aligns with prior research conducted by Howard Wainer who was also able to look up the scores of students who chose not to submit their scores under a test-optional admissions policy. It affirms that lower-scoring students tend not to submit scores and suggests that we’ll likely see lower college performance among students who didn’t submit their scores than among those who did. However, at this point, whether these findings will replicate the Wainer study is an open empirical question.
