Research funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and published by the National Bureau of Economic Research asserts that SAT/ACT scores are crucial to identifying students who will succeed in college:

[Excerpts]

From the working paper's abstract (the full paper will be released in May 2025):

Standardized test scores predict academic outcomes with a normalized slope four times greater than that from high school GPA, all conditional on students’ race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Standardized test scores also exhibit no calibration bias, as they do not underpredict college performance for students from less advantaged backgrounds. Collectively these results suggest that standardized test scores provide important information to measure applicants’ academic preparation that is not available elsewhere in the application file.

[Other statistical findings from the body of the paper]:

...SAT and ACT scores have substantial predictive power in forecasting students’ academic performance. Even when comparing students from the same racial or ethnic and socioeconomic background, students with the highest possible score (i.e., 1600 on the SAT or 36 on the ACT) achieve a first-year college GPA that is 0.43 higher on a 4.0 scale (equal to 1 SD in the college GPA distribution) than students with an SAT score of 1200 or ACT score of 25 (equating to the 75th percentile of the national distribution of scores). These lower-scoring students are also 42 percentage points more likely to struggle academically during their first year (defined as receiving at least one grade of C+ or lower). We also find that students who do not submit test scores (as part of test-optional admissions policies at these schools in 2021-2023) achieve significantly lower levels of academic performance in college, equivalent to students who submitted SAT scores of roughly 1300 or ACT scores of 28.

...in contrast with standardized test scores, high school GPA has relatively little predictive power for academic success during a student’s first year. Comparing students with a perfect 4.0 high school GPA to those with a 3.2 GPA – a gap of the same magnitude in the distribution of applicants as the test score gap discussed above – predicts a difference in first-year college GPA of less than 0.1.

[Note: Critics of Friedman's other standardized test-related research cite his questionable metrics of student success tied to SAT/ACT scores, namely measuring the proportion of students going on to attend elite graduate schools or obtaining employment at prestigious firms.]

 
The College Fix has comments by the study's author:

[Excerpts]

Lead author Professor John Friedman, who teaches economics at Brown University, shared with The College Fix some of the details of his team’s work.

Regarding the research sample, Friedman said the team used data from first-year students at “multiple Ivy-plus colleges.”

“The choice to look at first year scores was entirely driven by data, in that we were able to collect comparable data on first year grades from our partner institutions but not for longer-term grades,” Friedman explained to The Fix in a recent interview. “We’ve looked at grades in later years of college within individual schools, and the broad pattern (test scores are predictive, high school GPA is not) remains.”

“In a separate paper, I have also shown that test scores but not high school GPA predict students’ post-college outcomes, including earning higher incomes, attending elite graduate schools, and working at prestigious firms,” the professor said.

“So while this is a limitation for this specific paper, I’m not concerned that the effects would be very different if we looked at longer-term outcomes,” he said.

As for the study’s findings on “race, gender, and socioeconomic status,” Friedman told The Fix: “We are measuring the predictive power of both test scores and GPA among students with the same race, gender, and socioeconomic status … Importantly, this is not about comparing test scores and grades between students from different racial group groups, genders, or classes.”

Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow in education policy at the Heritage Foundation and former U.S. Department of Education official, also spoke with The Fix about the implications of Friedman’s team’s findings.

“Standardized tests designed to test college aptitude actually do predict college success—without bias,” Kissel wrote recently on X, linking to the working study.

In a recent interview with The Fix, Kissel elaborated, “This study shows that standardized tests are highly predictive of college success at more selective colleges. Selective colleges that went test-optional have been learning that they have done a worse job at admitting students who are likely to succeed, and this study helps show why.”

 
Liam Knox of Insider Higher Ed has written a detailed article titled "Is Admissions Trump’s Next Higher Ed Target?", which examines the potential actions of the Trump administration regarding college admissions in the wake of the Supreme Court's anti-affirmative action decision:

[Excerpts]

Last month the government cut $400 million in federal funding for Columbia University and sent a list of demands the university would have to meet to get it back. Among them: “deliver a plan for comprehensive admission reform.”

The administration sent a similar letter earlier this month to Harvard University after freezing $9 billion in funding, demanding that the university “adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies” and “cease all preferences based on race, color, ethnicity or national origin in admissions.”

And in March the Department of Justice launched investigations into admissions practices at Stanford University and three University of California campuses, accusing them of defying the Supreme Court’s decision banning affirmative action in June 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

Exactly what the Trump administration believes is going on behind closed doors in highly selective college admissions offices remains unclear. The University of California system has been prohibited from considering race in admissions since the state outlawed the practice in 1996, and both Harvard and Columbia have publicly documented changes to their admissions policies post-SFFA, including barring admissions officers from accessing the applicant pool’s demographic data.

Regardless, given the DOJ investigations and demands of Columbia and Harvard—not to mention potential demands at newly targeted institutions like Princeton, Northwestern and Brown—the federal government appears set to launch a crusade against admissions offices.

Test-optional admissions policies are likely to become a magnet for federal scrutiny. In a February Dear Colleague letter instructing colleges to eliminate all race-conscious programming, the Education Department wrote that test-optional policies could be “proxies for race” to help colleges “give preference” to certain racial groups.

Columbia is one of the few Ivy League institutions to retain the test-optional policy it put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic; Harvard reinstated testing requirements this past application cycle.

Eric Staab, vice president of admissions and financial aid at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., said his institution isn’t concerned about drawing the Trump administration’s ire, despite going test-blind this year and maintaining a stable level of racial diversity.

For one, he said, he’s not sure the Office for Civil Rights will be staffed well enough to take on more than a handful of target institutions after the Education Department’s mass layoffs last month. Even if it is, Staab said he’s confident that post-SFFA, investigators wouldn’t find anything illegal or even objectionable at Lewis & Clark.

“Admissions has always been a merit-based process … with the [SFFA decision], pretty much all of us needed to do some tweaking or major overhaul of our admissions and financial aid policies, and we did that,” he said. “I’m not worried about them sending people into reading sessions, because we have nothing to cover up.”

 
A computer hacker broke into NYU's student database, stealing and posting sensitive data (including SAT/ACT scores and race) regarding a huge number of NYU applicants. Washington Square News has the details:

A hacker took over NYU’s website for at least two hours Saturday morning to expose over 3 million applicants’ names, test scores, majors and zip codes, as well as information related to family members and financial aid dating back to at least 1989.

The university’s website was restored at around noon. The hacked page displayed three charts with what the group claims to be NYU’s average admitted SAT scores, ACT scores and GPAs for the 2024-25 admissions cycle. The group argued that despite the Supreme Court’s takedown of affirmative action in 2023, “NYU continued anyway,” showing that the average admitted test scores and GPAs for Asian and white applicants were higher than those who identify as Hispanic or Black.

The page, first reported by a user on Reddit at around 10:30 a.m., included four accessible CSV files revealing NYU admissions data since at least 1989, including over 3 million admitted students’ applications, demographic data, city and zip codes, and citizenship status. The files also show Common Application data, which includes details of financial aid, rejected students, how many students applied Early Decision and personal information about siblings and parents.

In July 2023, NYU issued a statement condemning the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling as a “step backwards.” Admissions data released last October showed a significant drop in historically underrepresented minority groups — namely students who identify as “Black, Hispanic, Native American and Hawaiian and other Pacific islander” — with Black student enrollment falling to 4% from 7% and Latino student enrollment falling to 10% from 15%. In a corresponding statement, president Linda Mills said the changes were “not unanticipated” but that the university will “continue to innovate on.”

 
So much for holistic admissions: A newly-founded university in Austin, Texas has implemented a straightforward admissions policy featuring standardized test scores:

[Excerpts]

The University of Austin in Texas is implementing a “merit-first admissions” policy that automatically admits students who pass a certain standardized test score threshold.

The university announced on Monday that students who score “1460+ on the SAT, 33+ on the ACT, or 105+ on the CLT” will be “automatically admitted,” and those with even higher scores--totaling more than 1550, 35, and 113 on the SAT, ACT, and CLT respectively--could potentially receive the $100,000 Lonsdale Magaro Build Scholarship.

The university requires applicants to submit their high school transcript or a GED certificate, and notes that “[n]o essays, extracurriculars, or GPAs are considered” for students who pass the standardized test scoring thresholds.

In its announcement, the university called current college admissions in higher education “biased,” “broken,” and “unjust,” before presenting its merit-based admissions policy as a solution, saying: “We care about two things: Intelligence and courage.”

As part of its condemnation of other schools’ admissions policies, the University of Austin also stated that “[s]tudents spend high school anxiously stacking their résumés with hollow activities, then collect generic recommendation letters and outsource their essays to tutors or AI. Admissions at elite colleges now come down to who you know, your identity group, or how well you play the game. This system rewards manipulation, not merit.”

Students who score below or equal to the new thresholds can still join the school through the regular admissions process, and will be ranked based off of their standardized test scores, as well as their “AP scores (4-5), IB scores (5-7), or SAT Subject Tests (700+).”

 
More on the new university can be found here.

 
Another research project funded by the Gates Foundation will assess the long-term impact of test-optional admissions:

[Excerpts]

The College Admissions Futures Co-Laborative (CAF Co-Lab), a multi-institutional research initiative based at Penn State, the University of Delaware and the University of Maryland, College Park, has received a $560,000 grant from the Gates Foundation to study the long-term effects of test-optional admissions policies.

“With this new project, we aim to answer a critical question: What are the implications of test-optional policies for students’ academic outcomes?” said Kelly Rosinger, associate professor of education and public policy. “By analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data, we hope to provide a clearer understanding of how these policies shape student success and inform more equitable admissions practices.”

CAF Co-Lab is a multi-institutional partnership of faculty, researchers and scholar-practitioners from Penn State, the University of Delaware and the University of Maryland, College Park. The new grant builds upon a $1.4 million grant awarded to the team in 2022, which led to the publication of a policy brief.

The CAF Co-Lab’s previous research highlighted the widespread yet varied adoption of test-optional policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the height of this shift, according to the researchers’ policy brief, approximately 90% of selective four-year colleges implemented test-optional admissions, but with significant differences in execution. Some institutions adopted a fully test-free approach, while others required alternative assessments or retained testing mandates for specific groups, such as international or home-schooled students. Additionally, many colleges continued linking standardized test scores to scholarship eligibility, further complicating the admissions process.

This inconsistent implementation led to confusion among students and admissions professionals, Rosinger said. Crucially, the researchers found that policy design directly related to enrollment outcomes. They found that the most inclusive test-optional and test-free policies — those applied universally to all students and those including test-optional consideration for scholarships — were associated with increasing access for Black students.

“These findings underscore that simply adopting test-optional policies is not enough; their effectiveness depends on how they are structured and designed,” Rosinger said.

 
The Telegraph recently published an article about a high-priced college admissions consultant.

[Excerpts]

How do you get your child into a fiercely competitive, world-renowned Ivy League university?

You pay admissions guru Christopher Rim $750,000.

The 29-year-old chief executive of Command Education is the mastermind behind hundreds of teenagers from wealthy families winning coveted spots at the world’s best institutions.

With his team of mentors on call 24/7, Mr Rim offers students from as young as 12 unlimited help with everything from preparing for exams to cultivating a “compelling hook” to draw in university admissions staff.

“Demand is really growing, our business is operating incredibly well, so I’m very happy about that,” Mr Rim tells The Telegraph.

He’s not wrong – the company turns over more than $20 million a year. Mr Rim owns a $7.5 million home in Miami and a $2.3 million apartment in Manhattan.

He has tapped into the booming industry of independent education consultants which, according to marketing firm IBISWorld, has ballooned in value from $400 million to $3 billion in a decade.

Command’s current clients include one of the top 10 most followed influencers on Instagram, the chief executive of one of the largest banks in Europe and the president of a country.

While the majority of his students are based in New York, a third are international and include British teenagers studying at Harrow, Eton and Radleigh.

They get students Oxbridge places every year, although most end up choosing elite US schools.

“All I can say is that we work with a lot of influential families in the UK,” Mr Rim adds.

...parents pay him and his team of 42 $120,000-a-year for their help.

The full package from seventh grade to university admission costs $750,000, which includes unlimited tutoring for SAT and ACT exams.

Seven years ago, Mr Rim had around 40 students, this year he is helping 220.

 
Spurning the recent trend of test score requirement reinstatements, Lafayette College faculty has voted to retain the college's test optional policy for three years, albeit with an option of rescinding the policy on an annual basis.