The End of an Academic Illusion

By Jeffrey Blehar

Saturday, April 13, 2024

 

I’ve spent far too much time writing about Harvard University recently. It’s the sort of hazardous activity that, with prolonged exposure, toxifies a man’s soul. So I just wanted to drop in this Saturday afternoon with a brief note on a major — indeed symbolically terminal — milestone marking the end of one of elite academia’s most obviously misbegotten experiments: Harvard University has announced that it, too, is returning to requiring SAT/ACT standardized test scores for all applicants. This follows in the wake of announcements by other schools that dropped test requirements during the Covid/George Floyd era — M.I.T., Dartmouth, and Yale — that they are reverting to requiring test scores for admissions. (Yale’s explanation for reinstating testing requirements was notable insofar as large parts of it could have been written by the editors of National Review.)

 

Harvard held out longer than most; it dropped its testing requirement back in June 2020, when it was at least somewhat understandable given the difficulties of test-taking under lockdown conditions. But then the school kept it going. M.I.T. was the first to reinstate testing requirements, back in 2022 — one suspects it is more difficult to hide the incompetence of an entire class of students when it comes to the STEM disciplines than in the humanities. Dartmouth and Yale did so in February. And now Harvard, the biggest and most influential domino of them all, has finally fallen.

 

So can you imagine how terrible the Class of 2028 must look? The three Ivy League schools pushing the big red button, all at the same time — there is obviously a bandwagon effect going on here, after three admissions cycles of what must be disturbingly underqualified (and, as we have seen recently, under-socialized as well) classes of students.

 

Columbia University, desperately late to the party, elected only last year to remove standardized testing requirements from admissions. I think constantly about how stupid the people who run the school must feel right now, locked into a policy they can’t change without the most abject sort of climbdown. And even worse, how stupid they must feel to have been the last to jump onto this disastrously rickety and out-of-control bandwagon, only to watch their peer schools — the ones whose presence on it coaxed and cajoled Columbia to get on board — look quietly at one other, hold hands, and jump off.