In the fall of 2023, a small liberal arts college in New England did something that barely made a ripple in the national news cycle. It dropped the ACT requirement. Not for pandemic reasons. Not temporarily. Permanently.
Most Americans shrugged. The ACT has been fading from relevance for years, right? More than 1,800 colleges and universities are now test-optional. The pandemic accelerated a trend that was already underway. Case closed.
But here's what the headlines missed. Something stranger is happening beneath the surface of American education, and the ACT is sitting right at the center of it.
Start with the numbers nobody puts on a chart. The ACT was taken by nearly 2 million students at its peak in 2019. By 2023, that number had dropped below 1.4 million. That's not a gradual decline. That's a collapse. Meanwhile, the test's parent organization, ACT Inc., has quietly restructured its business model, pivoting hard into workforce assessments and corporate credentialing. The company that once defined college readiness is now selling itself as a job skills evaluator.
Why would a testing giant abandon its cash cow? Follow the money.
The answer sits inside a broader realignment of American meritocracy. For decades, the ACT and SAT served as standardized gatekeepers, imperfect but consistent. A kid from rural Mississippi and a kid from Manhattan prep school took the same exam. That shared metric, whatever its flaws, created a national baseline.
Remove the baseline, and what fills the void? Holistic admissions. Essays. Extracurriculars. Letters of recommendation. On paper, that sounds fairer. In practice, it rewards students with the resources to craft a narrative, to hire consultants, to build a resume that sparkles. The children of privilege don't need the ACT. They never did.
Here's where it gets interesting. Several states still mandate the ACT for all public high school juniors, often funded by taxpayers. That means millions of American families are paying for a test their kids may never need for college. The testing companies and the states have a symbiotic relationship that few voters ever examine. Follow the contracts. Follow the lobbying. The trail leads to statehouses, not classrooms.
And then there's the data question. The ACT collects enormous amounts of student information. Demographics. Academic history. Career interests. In an era when data is the most valuable commodity on earth, what happens to that information when the test's influence wanes? Does it get sold? Licensed? Aggregated into workforce analytics? The privacy policies are long, and almost nobody reads them.
This isn't a conspiracy in the tinfoil-hat sense. It's something more mundane and more troubling. Institutions adapt. Incentives shift. The ACT didn't disappear because America suddenly valued equity. It faded because the machinery of American advantage found new gears to grind.
The real story isn't whether the ACT is dying. It's what's being built in its place, and who gets to decide what merit means in a country that has never agreed on the answer.
**The Takeaway:** The ACT's decline looks like progress, but it may just be a handoff. When one gatekeeper steps aside, another always steps up. The question Americans should be asking isn't whether standardized tests are fair. It's who benefits from the chaos that replaces them.