Casey Near, Executive Director of Counseling at Collegewise, published a terrific article yesterday on how students who will be applying to college in 2022 should approach standardized testing. To Test or Not To Test: Junior Edition – it’s well worth the five minute read.
This comes on the heels of New York University announcing that they’ve received 100,000+ applications for the Fall 2021 term, a 20% increase over last year. Prior to this year, only UCLA had hit that mark in the U.S. Though NYU has had a “test flexible” policy for some time, they relaxed even that policy last June because of testing limitations forced by the COVID pandemic.
The publicity that comes with receiving over 100,000 applications is real – NYU itself even put out a press release celebrating the occasion. All of this is to say that Casey Near’s theory that “it’s very likely colleges will remain test optional for the class of 2022” is further supported, in my opinion, by the idea that NYU and other institutions with massive increases will be hesitant to risk receiving fewer applications next fall. We’ll see how this all plays out in the coming months.