Second, while SAT scores are linked to family income, the link is not as tight as critics sometimes suggest, and standardized tests are probably a less class-bound metric than many things that go into more “holistic” assessments. Lots of kids use the SAT or ACT to get a boost out of a bad school or prove themselves despite lacking a polished résumé, and there’s little clear evidence that going test-optional increases racial diversity. Whereas the college essay (assuming it survives ChatGPT), the extracurricular-laden résumé, the right demeanor in the college interview — all of these seem more likely to be indicators of privilege than a raw score on a standardized test. So the children of the upper class could be beneficiaries of the SAT’s decline, while children trying to climb could lose a crucial ladder.

The first point suggests a future where the diminishment of the SAT won’t change all that much about the meritocracy. The second suggests a future where the meritocracy becomes even more privileged and insular — but over time, less associated with talent and intelligence, in a way that steadily undermines its legitimacy and influence.

The reason to expect the first, status-quo scenario is that elite colleges like the legitimation that comes with being seen as talent destinations, so even without a formal SAT requirement they’ll still find a way to admit the kind of less-than-privileged kids who are currently boosted by standardized testing. As Matt Yglesias puts it, that search may make “admissions work a little bit more labor-intensive,” but schools like Harvard “can easily afford to hire more admissions officers to scrutinize applications that lack a convenient summary test score.”

The reason to wonder about the second scenario is that elite schools are also influenced by the ideological shifts within liberalism and the cultural shifts in young-adult life. And these forces push, in various ways, not just against the SAT but against all attempts to measure merit and demand excellence — with one push coming from students demanding higher grades and lower workloads, and another from ideological experiments like “equitable grading” and the progressive view that any measurement that reveals inequality must be perpetuating it.

In this environment, if the most famous benchmark of meritocracy is abandoned, not every school will necessarily devise complex heuristics that serve exactly the same purpose. Many may be content to just balance ethnic diversity with well-off students paying full tuition, coast on their reputations and let their standards slide a bit.