Yale Couldn’t Even Wait One Cohort to Bring Back the SAT - Here’s Why it Won’t Matter
America’s elite universities just reinstated the SAT and ACT - and it won’t matter, because the K-12 schools feeding them students can no longer produce kids who score high enough to meet the standards these universities held before they went woke. Grade inflation exploded. Standards collapsed. Tests vanished, accommodations multiplied, and expectations cratered in the name of “equity.” You cannot reinstate a test at the university level and expect better results from students whose entire education was engineered to avoid producing them. The pipeline is poisoned.
Elite universities deliberately destroyed academic standards - bankrolled by Qatar and China. They are staffed with tenured ideologues they call ‘scholars’ from places where literacy barely exists, admitting activists over achievers. They couldn’t survive one cohort under their own policy. Reinstating the SAT doesn’t fix decades of wreckage in the schools that feed them.
The elite prep schools that historically sent the sharpest students to the Ivies are still running the same experiment. The National Association of Independent Schools - whose member schools are the primary feeders for Harvard, Yale, and every major university - canceled its “People of Color Conference” only to rebrand it “Gather: A Convening for Renewal and Growth, Belonging, and Impact.” Its website confirms DEI remains the agenda - new name, same ideology. These are the schools preparing the next generation of Ivy League applicants.
The numbers prove it. 2025 SAT scores remain “substantially lower than pre-pandemic“ levels. Twelfth-grade reading and math scores hit a 20-year low. Grade inflation made transcripts meaningless: 42% of students placed in University of California remedial math had completed Calculus in high school, and 25% held a 4.0 GPA in high school math. A higher bar means nothing when the ladder to reach it has been sawed off.
Between 2021 and 2024, foreign governments poured nearly $29 billion into American campuses — as much as the previous four decades combined. Qatar leads all foreign donors, having funneled over $6.3 billion into U.S. universities since federal tracking began in 1986. Harvard and Yale failed to disclose hundreds of millions to the Department of Education.
Foreign donations “almost always come with strings attached.” Qatar is a state sponsor of Hamas. Northwestern’s contract with Qatar prohibits students and faculty from criticizing the Qatari government. The campus anti-America eruptions aren’t a coincidence.
Universities rewired their faculties to match. A survey by the American Association of University Professors found 21.5% of universities embedded DEI criteria into tenure. An American Enterprise Institute review found 19% of academic job postings required DEI loyalty statements. You don’t fire rigorous scholars outright — you just make it impossible for the next generation to get hired.
The result: more than 1,100 University of California math and science professors signed an open letter to the Board of Regents warning that unprepared students are lowering academic standards and draining teaching resources. In five years post-SAT removal, students with math skills below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold. Seventy percent scored below middle-school level. The letter is unsparing: “We now observe severe preparation deficits so serious that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching material students need for sciences, engineering, and economics.”
AAMC data show the 2024 entering medical school class averaged an MCAT of 497.4 for black applicants versus 508.8 for Asian applicants. Yet Do No Harm research found that in the 506–511 MCAT range, black applicants were accepted at 11.3% versus 3.6% for Asian applicants. At the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, black applicants were nearly ten times more likely to be admitted with identical scores. The consequences of that will show up in emergency rooms in hospitals.
55% of hiring managers had to fire a recent college graduate in 2024. Eight in ten said a recent hire didn’t work out. Only 30% of 2025 graduates found work in their field. Only 12% of company leaders said entry-level hires were prepared to do their jobs. 75% of employers say colleges are failing their workforce. Employers are not seeing diversity. They are seeing degrees that no longer certify competence.
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