Columbia Reinstates SAT and ACT Requirements, Completing the Ivy League's Retreat from Test-Optional Admissions

Columbia University announced on June 13 that Columbia College and Columbia Engineering will reinstate standardized testing requirements effective August 2027. First-year and transfer applicants seeking to enroll for Fall 2028 must submit SAT or ACT scores. The 2026-2027 cycle remains test-optional.

With this move, every Ivy League institution has now returned to required standardized testing.

How We Got Here

Columbia adopted its test-optional policy in 2020 as a temporary measure, citing limited testing access during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, it extended the policy with no stated end date, becoming, according to The College Fix, the first Ivy League school to make test-optional permanent. That distinction lasted less than three years.

Princeton reversed its own permanent test-optional policy in October 2025. Yale announced its return to required testing in February 2026. Columbia, as of June 13, is the last to follow.

What the Data Shows

Columbia's official announcement cited a "multi-year faculty review" that determined "test scores, among other factors, were a useful indicator of potential student success," according to the university's admissions webpage. The university did not set minimum score cutoffs. It described scores as one component of a holistic review.

Other institutions that made this move ahead of Columbia reported similar internal findings. Princeton told prospective students that "academic performance at Princeton was stronger for students who chose to submit test scores than for students who did not," according to ZeroHedge's reporting citing The Epoch Times. MIT reinstated its requirement in 2022 on comparable grounds.

Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions, Jeremiah Quinlan, was more direct. "Simply put, students with higher scores have been more likely to have higher Yale GPAs, and test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student's performance in Yale courses in every model we have constructed," Quinlan told Yale News, as reported by The College Fix.

The pattern is consistent across institutions. When elite universities looked at their own enrollment data over five-plus years of test-optional admissions, they found scores predicted outcomes better than not having them.

The Pressure From Faculty

It isn't just Ivy League administrators reading their internal dashboards. University of California mathematics faculty issued an open letter last month calling on the UC Board of Regents to reinstate standardized testing requirements. The letter has gathered more than 1,400 signatures, according to The College Fix.

The faculty cited a reported thirtyfold increase in students entering with math skills below high school level. "Over the past five years, we have seen a widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels within the same classroom," the letter reads. "This trend indicates that current admissions practices do not provide a sufficiently reliable check on mathematical readiness for STEM majors."

These are working professors describing what they're seeing in their own classrooms.

The Fair Case for Test-Optional

Critics of the reinstatement argue the original equity concern was real: standardized test scores correlate with household income and access to expensive test prep, meaning wealthier applicants can buy a scoring advantage. Students from under-resourced schools may have the academic potential to succeed at Columbia without having had the prep resources to prove it on a single Saturday morning exam. That concern did not disappear because the policy is being reversed.

Columbia's response, built into its new policy, is the waiver provision. Applicants who face documented challenges meeting the testing requirement can request a waiver at the time of application, according to the university's announcement. Whether that waiver process will be meaningfully accessible or will quietly become a bureaucratic dead end is an open question the university has not yet answered in detail.

Legal Insurrection's Mike LaChance framed the test-optional era flatly as a failure, comparing it to defunding the police. That comparison is partisan opinion, not a finding from the faculty reviews. The actual evidence is narrower. Columbia's own data found scores useful for predicting success among its enrolled students. That's a real finding. It doesn't by itself resolve the upstream question of whether score-optional policies were admitting more high-potential students who were then succeeding, or missing them.

What Comes Next

The University of California system, with its 10 campuses and roughly 300,000 undergraduates, remains a significant open question in American higher education on this issue. The faculty letter is advisory, not binding. The UC Board of Regents has not announced a policy change as of June 16, 2026. If the board moves, it would affect a student population several times larger than the entire Ivy League combined.

For Columbia specifically, the more immediate unresolved question is how the waiver process will function in practice. The university has committed to considering "individual circumstances and opportunity" in its review, but the mechanics, who qualifies, how many waivers are granted, and how scores are weighted against waiver cases have not been made public.