Parents who went through their own college admissions process in the 1990s or 2000s are often shocked when I walk them through what's changed since 2020. Some of it reversed. Some of it is permanent. Here's the honest state of things.
Test-optional: the pendulum is swinging back
When testing centers shut down in 2020, nearly every college went test-optional or test-blind out of necessity. Many schools kept that policy well past the immediate emergency, partly because it was popular and partly because it was untested at scale. But starting in 2024 and accelerating through 2025, the most selective schools in the country, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins among them, reinstated SAT or ACT requirements. Their public reasoning has been consistent: internal research showed test scores remained one of the strongest predictors of college academic performance, while grade inflation had made GPA a less reliable way to differentiate applicants. If you're applying to any of these schools now, treat testing as required, not optional, regardless of what you remember reading in 2021.
The application surge that never went away
Here's the part that surprises most families: even as testing requirements return, the application volume spike from the test-optional years never reversed. Students who wouldn't have applied to a reach school without a strong test score felt free to apply during the test-optional years, and that habit stuck. Harvard's acceptance rate fell from roughly 5% before the pandemic to about 3.6% by 2024. This is a structural shift in how many students are applying to the same small number of selective seats, and it's compounding with reinstated testing to make the most competitive tier of admissions genuinely harder than it was a decade ago.
What actually became permanent
Virtual info sessions, virtual tours, and online admissions events are here to stay. Schools built real infrastructure around these during the pandemic and kept investing in it afterward, partly because it's a cost-effective way to reach students who can't travel for an in-person visit. If demonstrated interest matters at a school on your list, virtual engagement now counts as a legitimate substitute for at least some in-person visits.
What quietly went back to normal
Application deadlines, essay prompts, recommendation letter processes, and the overall shape of holistic review have all returned to their pre-pandemic norms for the current cycle. If you're wondering whether some pandemic-era leniency still applies to your situation, for most schools and most policies, the answer is no.
What this means for your strategy
- Assume testing is required at any highly selective school unless you've verified otherwise for the current cycle
- Don't assume a school's acceptance rate from five years ago still applies, check the most recent Common Data Set
- Use virtual events genuinely, they count, but don't skip an in-person visit if a school values demonstrated interest highly and you're able to go
Testing rules keep shifting. Make sure your strategy hasn't gone stale.
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