Abstract
How significant was the role of racial preferences in U.S. college admissions before the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to ban race-based affirmative action? How much might test-optional admission policies impact racial diversity and academic merit? In this work, we estimate a simple model of college admissions decisions from 2012–2020, leveraging a novel dataset of applicant profiles and admissions outcomes across the full spectrum of college selectivity. We find that, broadly, the impact of race and testing policies on diversity and merit of admits decreases by college selectivity. For America’s less selective colleges that collectively enroll over three-quarters of students, fully eliminating preferences for race (and for unobserved factors which are correlated with race) has little impact on the proportion of underrepresented minorities (URM) and on the average SAT score of admitted students. In contrast, for the 34 most selective colleges accounting for 3 percent of total enrollment, our estimates suggest that admissions going “race blind”—absent any compensating changes in admissions criteria—could reduce URM admission by one-third while increasing the average SAT score of admits by no more than 10 points. We also estimate that universal test-optional admission may lead to a small increase in the proportion of URMs at the most selective colleges, while decreasing the average SAT score by up to 10 points. At less selective institutions, the effects are estimated to be negligible.