My school, Michigan Tech, is in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a remote location averaging over 200" of snow per year with the nearest major city over 5 hours away, and most students traveling 8+ hours from their parent's homes in SE Michigan. The application was 4 pages long: 1 page of info, 2 pages for me to fill out, 1 for my guidance counselor. No essays. So, very easy to be accepted to, 90%+ acceptance rate.
The second year return rate was below 70% at the time, and anecdotally many freshmen didn't return for second semester after going home for Christmas. Not only is it remote, cold, and not sunny, but there was a dearth of women and some tough weeder classes (chemistry, calc 2).
If you can finish, you're in a great spot. Eng degrees from there are quite well regarded regionally (competitive with University of Michigan) and graduates had lower debt than any other school in the state. It seems obvious that the university avoided a more stringent up-front filter so it could soak kids for a year or two before forcing them out due to grades or environment.
I'm not sure that's entirely unreasonable, as I'm not sure how they could predict who would leave due to environment, but I also knew many freshmen who were obviously not setup to succeed academically, and didn't.
imo this is an appropriate way for a public school to operate. everyone gets a shot, but people that can't make it get failed out early. way less debt for the student than dropping out years later, and more frugal with public funds too.
Welcome to Merry old Boston
The Land of the Bean and the Cod
where Lowells speak only to Cabbots
and Cabots speak only to G*dSome people fail out of college because the work is beyond their capabilities, but I think a significant percentage of people who start college but don't graduate do so for reasons other than being simply unqualified.
I admit it's anecdotal, but very few people I know who started college but didn't finish didn't finish due to academic reasons.
Enrollment might also be down because of COVID. For many, I think, college is more about getting away from home and living in a fun-filled alternate world for a few years with dorm rooms, frat parties, etc. With remote classes and restrictions, why bother?
(I'm imagining here -- I commuted to a local 4-year college on a public bus while also working. Then got my Master's degree in the evening while working full-time, in the early 80s.)
There are a handful of companies that own a huge margin of the standardized testing market(Pearson being one of them). From selling new test learning books every year, to the massive global standardized testing training market.
Maybe the movements to eliminate SATs have a different agenda, but generally the main reason you need those SATs is because the average education level in the US is so horrendous. Instead of fixing that problem there are a handful organizations acting as money printing machines and gatekeepers for higher education. It's frankly disgusting.
If you ever had to take ANY kind of industrialized generalized test, whether it's ISC2, PMI, 6 Sigma, TLA+ or just SAT's or IELTS/TOEFL GRE or even just normal US university multiple choice as a non American you might find the whole ordeal infuriatingly insulting(unless you studied medicine, in which case it's similar across the globe)
It's a lazy cop out for not giving teacher enough resources to actually teach.
It used to be common for selective colleges to administer their own proprietary admission exams. But that was a huge burden on students applying to multiple schools, hence the switch to standardized testing.
The answer depends on institution type.
Highly Selective Institutions: the admissions process is so hands-on and personal that I could believe they are able to get a good sense of each candidate without testing. E.g., I absolutely believe Harvard's admissions folks have the bandwidth to compare grades between high schools (not that they need to). And they do all sorts of stuff that gives you a better sense for the candidate than test scores (alumni interviews, essays, rec letters, delving into performance in highly competitive extra-curriculars, exceptional community service work, etc).
Non-Selective Institutions (let's say admissions >70%): Standardized tests are kind of a waste of time and money for all involved. These institutions are functionally admitting everyone who can manage to fill out the admissions paperwork and didn't systematically fail high school courses. It makes sense to make test scores optional, because there might be a few diamonds in the 30% "oof" pile who can pull off a decent SAT score to compensate for their D-average-no-honors-courses transcript. But requiring the SAT/ACT is silly when your admissions standards are extremely low.
Moderately Selective Institutions: I definitely see utility in these universities still using the SAT. But notice that this is actually a very small set of institutions. Perhaps 100-300 the US's 3K+ colleges fit in this category.
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FWIW, my opinion on SAT/ACT is somewhere in the middle.
I think standardized tests can be an excellent instrument when some form of assessment is necessary but more nuanced assessments of merit are cost-prohibitive. So for places like competitive state flagships, I think getting rid of testing and replacing it with an admissions process that works at least as good as testing is probably more expensive than it's worth.
However, I also think the pro-testing camp is often extremely hyperbolic. Testing is just one way of assessing merit. It has all sorts of flaws. Tests are a model, and all models are wrong.
As an aside, I'm not surprised that so many pro-SAT-the-sky-is-falling folks are mathematicians. That entire field is completely fucked up when in comes to testing. Math as a discipline is bad about intellectual peacocking in general... if you think Mensa is insufferable, spend an afternoon in a math dept. Math professors are exactly the last set of people in the world I would trust to have a healthy attitude toward the ability of testing to suss out real merit. They literally talk about their prelim exams the same way frat bros talk about hazing rituals. Systematic misuse of testing is the second biggest reason that people choose to do phds in math-adjacent fields instead of math. (The biggest reason is job prospects.)
The same goes for infant mortality. People cite infant mortality as evidence that our healthcare system sucks. But really infant mortality is clustered in certain sub populations.
The same goes for murder rates and gun violence.
Unfortunately the problems cannot be fixed until people admit and are willing to talk about the underlying actual root causes.
I also have first-hand knowledge of a fair number of students who took some time off during the pandemic.